Karibu Tanzania/ Welcome to Tanzania

First of all, thank you for taking your time to read this post. I’m saying that because I’ve never had enough patience to read people’s personal blogs. To be honest, I personally never understood why people brag about their lives on the web. So here is my sincere gratitude for you, if you ever get through this post…

I’m gonna start with a simple question: “Are you afraid of spiders?”

Keep that in mind.

For my first post, I can’t avoid sharing some personal experiences I had since I got in Tanzania. Things have been pretty different from my life back in Brazil and so many things already changed my life perspective. Sorry for being so egocentric in this post, but this will be mainly about my impressions and specific moments I had in Africa.

My first impression of Tanzania is definitely the welcoming people I met here. Everywhere I go, people want to talk to me and they all welcome me with a great smile. People open up their houses and share everything they have with outsiders. The sense of collectiveness is unbelievable, what belongs to them belongs to me as well, without them even knowing me at all.

So that's home! That's the village I'm living. It has about three thousand people and pretty much everyone has a little piece of land where they farm and that’s how they support themselves, from the outcomings of the farm… People do suffer from hunger in Magoma… Right now is a period just after harvest, so no one is actually starving, but  some months before my arrival people were dying from hunger. The previous project coordinator went to 4 funerals in a week…

This is a place where electricity is luxury. I paid 33 dollars for electricity at mine and it will last for about three months. Just a few people have TV. Probably three people in the whole village have TV. (I’m actually glad they don’t). Just an example, one banana costs 6 cents (in dollar) and many people don’t have money to buy it, if there is any available banana on the market anyways…

You would probably think or assume that if I’m going to a rural village where many people are poor and/or suffer from hunger, that would be ironically a natural spa, where I would loose weight and get dehydrated. But no, that’s a totally wrong idea. Wherever I go, whenever I visit people, they feed me up with loads of food all the time. Denying would be rude, that’s what hospitality means for them, they share food and welcome you that way. And I do eat a lot here, full of starch and oil. And I’ve been putting up some weight…

The first month of my stay in Tanzania was Ramadan month for Muslim people and that was an amazing experience. Muslims during this period feast during all day and when they have the first meal of the day at night, it is a huge “banquet” full of great food. I was eating every day with a Muslim family and had a blast!

The family is HUGE (I still don’t know who is son, cousin, uncle, ant, … It is just impossible to know who is who… and I see this family every day…) and that’s how most families are here, they have innumerous kids, some of the parents can’t even tell how many children they have. If you ask them “How many children do you have?”, some will answer “Many” or “Not less than 5”…

Talking about Muslim people… Religion is one of the things that surprised mehere in Africa… You would think that if you are going to an isolated place in a rural village that can’t even be found on google maps, you would expect a certain presence of an African religion, but again wrong idea. (Or maybe that’s my own stupidity of not knowing stuff).  

Half of the people in the village are Muslims and the other half are Christians.  I wasn’t expecting to see that type of share in a rural village in Africa. And surprisingly they get along really well, they go to each other’s houses, they are friends and celebrate together. Religions do coexist in this place. As one Muslim local person said “Muslim Religion and Christianity are pretty much the same, there are just a few differences between them, but the essence is the same”.  I wish I could bring him on CNN to say that out loud to the western world.

Next topic is the Kids. OH MY GOD. Seriously, they arise from the profound of the earth all the time. Everywhere you look there is a child. I’m not exaggerating. The school I’m working on a project has about 820 kids. If you think of the size of this village, that’s a huge amount of the population.

I absolutely love their reaction towards me. Lots of children want to be around me, touch my hair, grab my hands and walk together. Their smiles are truly my everyday motivation to be here.

There is this particularly child, my 3 year old neighbor, who is so scared of me. Whenever he sees me, he cries hard. He looks at me with a scared little face. When I say something to him, he either try to hide on the back of his brothers or he runs towards his mother full of fear and searching for a safe place away from this white ET person. The other day I tried to approach him and he literally ran as fast as he could away from me searching for his mother, but she was out of sight and his brothers were not around. The mother saw from further away that he was crying because he was scared of me. She came towards us and said to him “Come here right now. Be fast!” That was a shock treatment for him, he would take to steps forward in our direction and one backwards crying to death. And his mother “Come now!”. She forced him to talk to me.
She after all said “He just need to get used to you”...

I do regret my move. I was sorry for him.

Here in Tanzania kids are very independent, they know how to take care of people and their homes. At age of nine they are able to cook for the whole family, kids at 4 years help their mothers at home. I’ve seen many times little kids holding huge knives that are bigger than their bodies and I still haven’t gotten used to this though.

The other day I was cutting tomatoes with this little tiny knife and I cut my finger… Seeing children with knives that are bigger than themselves it is a scary thought...

At school they get beaten with sticks. They have to obey the older authority no matter what. That I’ll never get used…

Last week me and 5 other American friends, we were talking to this African lady about beating children... We told her that in America it is a crime if you do so and her answer was  “You Americans are smart, we Africans need to be beaten.”

(No further commentary on this).

And so…Let’s talk about the project… There is the project website if you guys want to check it out (www.themagomaproject.tumblr.com). We (me and the American girl working with me) haven’t been able to update frequently… I think we will be soon posting some interesting stuff there… And that’s the official place to look for project news…

But here is a bit of what I’ve been working. The picture you see is the school farm in the primary school in Magoma. That’s where we are currently having pepper crop and this week we will be planting onions and more peppers. After the harvest, we sell those crops and with the money gained we can keep up with the school feeding program. Every kid eats at school every day.

The projects investments we have made so far is 219.000,00 xelins (approximately 139,33 dollars). That’s going to be probably our biggest investment throughout the 9 months in Magoma. With that little money we can see many positive things happening in this place and community.

(And we see so many millions of dollars coming to Africa from foreign aid for years and years and nothing meaningful actually happening…)

One interesting thing that has happened frequently is people asking me for advice. When I talk to local people about the project they keep asking me questions, “What should we plant here?”, “What do you think we should be doing with this piece of land?”… My inner me is pretty much like “Woops, I have no clue!”. I feel like saying “Hey, sorry, I have no clue about this. You are talking to someone that has a business degree and no knowledge in agricultural matters, I can’t even recognize the difference between the crops we are planting, I don’t know if they are peppers or whatever else”….

I think some see us white people coming from far away as wise and knowledged people that have answers for all sorts of stuff.  The other day a guy asked me “What do you think we Africans should be doing to change the poverty in Tanzania?”… And then he said “You Americans that come from far away are able to see things that we Africans don’t see. So, for the time you have been here you already oversaw us, what shall we do?”….

As far as personal and daily life, showers are pretty much bucket showers with brown water from the river. No access (or very limited access) to the internet. Sleeping under bed nets. Electricity was coming in spurts, it was lasting for ten minutes and then it would just switch off. So I was going to bed very much early. Now it seems to be working better, it has being working properly for the past days and I hope it remains like that.

Daily meals at peoples’ places with lots of food. As I said before, people keep feeding me up all the time.

Dressing code here is pretty strict. Woman here don’t wear low cuts and don’t show their legs at all. It is culturally and religiously unacceptable. And so I gotta wear long skirts and closed up t-shirts with sleeves. And here is SO HOT! I will probably melt during summer in January…

Me and Lindsay (the American girl), we are the only white people living in the village. Probably we are the only white people living in this entire region…lol…And so we are very much popular. Everyone knows who we are and we gotta greet people every 5 seconds when we are walking around the village.

I’ve never valued being unknown as much as I value now.

(I very much miss being unknown and anonymous.)

One of my main challenges is Kiswahili language. It is a mixture of Bantu and Arabic languages.  I came with zero knowledge of the language. The only thing I was able to say was “Hakuna Matata” because of the movie Lion King (the movie was inspired by East Africa and Kiswahili language). Literally it means “There are no problems”. But when I got here I found out that that’s not the proper way to say it. Lol. And so the truth is that I knew nothing and I couldn’t say a word in Kiswahili.

I’m having fun learning it. It is actually one of the fastest growing languages in the world and it is spoken in countries like Somalia, Kenia, Uganda, Ruanda, Congo. Being able to speak it fluently is one of my main concerns, because it is important to be able to effectively communicate in order to deeply understand community needs and to address the project involving actively local people.

Back to the question I had in the beginning and I promise this is the last thing.

The first night in the village, guess what!? A black scary huge spider in Lindsay’s bedroom. That was a huge issue. We are both afraid of spiders. We actually didn’t really know what to do… Shall we kill it?... Shall we hunt it and enclose it somewhere?... Shall we… what!?... And, of course, no electricity to help us keep track on the spider footsteps…

Lindsay suddenly says “Shit! No light! We lost the spider…  Cintia, get the headlamp, quickly”… And so in a team effort and some epic moments hunting the spider, we made it! We captured it and put it in a Tupperware well closed. And just to make sure it wouldn’t come back, we put the Tupperware outside the house and we also locked the door, just in case the spider suddenly becomes a giant spider…

Second day in the village, I’m tired and ready to go to bed, and… Hah, another scary spider ON MY BED. Apparently, that’s a dangerous one, as Lindsay said. (That’s when I realized how dependent I’m on google, just as a source of information for general survivors’ things)…And here I go again on the mission to capture the enemy…

Ok, third night, and guess what?!... Oh, just another scary spider…

Oh, well, it doesn’t look that scary anymore…

A month from now if you asked me “Are you afraid of spiders?” the answer would positively be “Yes!” . Now try to ask me the same question… my reply would be “No, I even named the one living in my bedroom as Nini, cute nickname for my new pet”…

__

So, after all this post, the only thing I can say is that I’m happy being here.

Stepping out of my own bubble world and experiencing what is different is changing my perspective of life. Nothing more meaningful than be thrown out in a totally diverse and isolated place.

In Magoma there is clearly a lack of materialistic resources, but people are amazingly great and welcoming. They’ve taught me so much in such a short time. This place has shown me the beauty that arises from being part of such a joyful place.

Reality and people are changing me.  

I hope that with this brief post you were able to somehow feel this experience.

Thanks for your patience! ; )

Tuko Pamoja! / We are all together!

Cintia.

P.S.: I forgot to put pics from my camera in my computer before coming to Korogwe (town where I have good internet service)... Sorry people!...
I'll try to post pics next time I come to Korogwe.