I am starting to fee like I can’t catch up on anything. I want to write about the week before I get to the weekend, and the next thing I know it’s the weekend. Time really flies here; I can’t believe I’ve been here for two weeks already. I honestly feel like I just got here yesterday. It’s making me realize that eight weeks will certainly not be enough, even though that’s all I have here. I would prefer not to think about the fact that I have to leave much sooner than I want to, and instead want to catch you all up on everyday life, because that’s what everyone keeps asking me about in emails! Looking back on my first couple of blog posts, I don’t really blame anyone for asking questions. I have no idea what I was writing about, and I certainly had no idea what I was doing here or what was going on. It’s taken a few weeks, but I finally feel completely comfortable and at home here. I knew it would happen eventually, and I’m really glad it did, but again, it makes me really sad that I only have two months here, meaning I only have six weeks left of feeling this way!
To start fielding the questions about what life is like here, from the people I live with to where and how I live to what the town and people are like in Arusha, let me start by saying that none of it was exactly what I was expecting. I guess in my mind, when I think of Africa, I think of that quintessential African village (which certainly exists, in many places, actually), but Arusha is certainly not that. It is much more developed that I expected. I mean, we have a ShopRite, tons of salons, and computer stores that fix Macs, so it is certainly not a struggling African village. However, even for being a relatively more developed area, there are still differences here that make you realize you are certainly not in Baltimore (or whatever US city you would like to insert). We frequently lose power and internet, stores run out of things (like sugar!), the water turns off and runs out…these all can be a little annoying sometimes, but I am actually learning to enjoy them and treat them as part of what I signed up for. It would be pretty disappointing to show up to Africa and have it be exactly like it is at home. Now I appreciate the power outages, showering under a cold spit (it makes the random warm showers much more with it), and losing internet so that we have to play innovative games around the house (so far this has meant trying to capture people and ‘fumigate’ them with air fresheners when they are in their rooms). Feel free to enjoy the pictures from our last cabin fever night, which culminated in an amazing victory for me in a heated game of Egyptian Rat Screw.
Arusha isn’t a big city (I know because I have managed to figure out where everything is, and if I can do it, it can’t possible be that big). There are basically two roundabouts you need to know, one is the elephant roundabout and the other is the clock tower (and if you think it’s a Big Ben type of clock tower, you are mistaken, it is a third that size). I know I’ve mentioned this before, but walking around Arusha is more or less a death sentence. Road safety is something to be desired. We are collectively getting better and more aggressive at walking and maneuvering the roads, especially around the roundabouts. There are cars everywhere, and lots of traffic. (Side note: Toyotas are everywhere, as well as lots of Fords, Land Rovers, and even a good amount of Nissans.) The dangers of walking aside, being in Arusha is really nice because you have some of the niceties of a city, such as good restaurants and places to go out at night. We don’t eat out often (because we get dinner cooked for us) but there are a few places to note so far. Africafe is a haven for when you are craving something delicious – they have a frozen chocolate mocha that is pretty much the best thing I have ever tasted, and if you are craving pancakes with syrup, they have it there. Their food is really good, a little more pricey, but going there is a nice treat. There are also some great local places we have found. I’ve talked before about Fast Food (eating a traditional plate for two dollars is pretty amazing), and we also tried a place last Sunday called Nick’s Pub that had fresh fish and chips. Now, the fish was a little different, and I think we were all taken aback when the fish came out on the plate complete with it’s eyeball peeking out at me, but it was fresh and really delicious and came with a dipping sauce that we have been unable to identify but is my favorite sauce I’ve encountered in awhile. Another note: dust. Dust is everywhere. My first day here I think I sneezed about fifty times in a row; now I start every day with an allergy tablet. There is literally just dust everywhere, on the roads, on your clothes, everywhere. I don’t know what I would do without Claritin and Allegra.
The people here are a mixture of good, bad, interesting, and sometimes annoying. On the whole, I wouldn’t use the word annoying, but there is a particular creeper named Michael who tries to walk me home from wherever I am every day and get me to go on Safaris for him (he also told me yesterday that I shouldn’t be worried that I’m 24 and not married yet). You do encounter a lot of men who heckle you a little bit, or instead of being mean and heckling you, are overly friendly and want to marry you. It’s mostly harmless and just awkward and annoying when you think of all the different ways to turn them down (I told Michael yesterday that I was moving to Kenya). Good word to know: Hapana (it means no). Unfortunately it took me two weeks remember to use it, but it’s becoming number one Kiswahili word in my vocabulary these days. Other people I’ve met are much more satisfactory. The various tour guides we have had, the people working at the NGOs I have been interning with, and the women here are all incredibly friendly and helpful.
I feel like I am jumping all over the place a little bit here, but going back to some of the stuff with our house that I forgot to talk about before. First, I really love this house. I never expected to feel so comfortable living here (the bed mattress and pillow are a little hard, but have grown on me), but the house is big and spacious and there are windows everywhere. I guess they know what they’re doing here and they build houses for comfort, but I still can’t believe how cool it is. I think I expected to show up to Tanzania and sweat my balls off, but I often find myself to be cold and wrapped up in a blanket, which was unexpected but much appreciated. The weather is definitely starting to change, and I can feel it getting warmer, but as of right now I am loving it (I will also appreciate it when it gets hot and I can get my tan on 24/7). Did I talk about our house pets before? We have a few. One is a hedgehog that lives in the front garden. There are also cats around; I have personally seen the black cat who lives here and a white cat (even though the first time I saw the white cat streaking across the yard at night I thought it was a fox and I screamed). We also have a ratmouse. It is undetermined at this point whether it is a rat or mouse; apparently it has a black rat tail and other mouse qualities, but I actually have not personally seen it yet. Everyone else has spotted him from time to time, and he lives under our oven in the kitchen, but I worry that I will go my whole time here without meeting him for myself (surprisingly, mice are not one of the two hundred things that scare me).
Back to jumping all over the place, I wanted to say that the longer I have been here (and it certainly hasn’t been that long yet), the more I am seeing of areas around Arusha and that are a little outside of the city itself. This is when you run into the more quintessential African village life that I was talking about earlier. This isn’t where you find gated communities and guarded compounds like ours. The people who live in these places don’t have water coolers (you can tell because people who drink the tap water have brown teeth instead of white). Their houses and buildings are made with whatever materials they can acquire, and are built in rows right on top and next to each other. This is not the stuff that makes you feel good about a place, but it is the real nitty gritty stuff that you need to see to understand how people live. Life is hard here, and our existence in the privileged area of Arusha wouldn’t otherwise show us that. You develop a better and more comprehensive understanding of people when you see what they don’t have, and I appreciate everything they do get done given their obvious setbacks. It’s amazing, really, what people are capable of living without, and I know it’s cliché to say that and I have said and heard it many times, but it’s a whole other thing when you see it in action. So that has been pretty cool so far.
I’m going to wrap this up because it’s the weekend and I have go to pursue my very difficult Master’s degree in hiking and drinking banana beer. Actually I am in the middle of working on a few projects: I am working with Future Stars Academy on community empowerment and capacity building; I am developing a microfinance project for a village in Moshi; I am communicating with primary schools in Arusha to organize a project with my Mom’s fifth graders; and I am also organizing a marketing project for the Tanzania semester program for Arcadia where I am going to do program evaluations and assessments on as many NGOs in the area as possible to generate greater interest in the program here. In the meantime, I am working on my Master’s thesis and exploring what I think about development, aid, and poverty. I have been catching a lot of flack from everyone about this vacation I’ve been on, and I know I tend to put the fun stuff on my blog and not the rest of the stuff, so from now on I’ll throw out some of both. There are 24 hours in a day and you can do a lot more with those hours over here than you can at home.
In the meantime, here’s my reading list that I highly recommend to anyone who has the free time to tackle ten books. They are informative, interesting, and have been shaping a lot of what I’ve been thinking about while I’ve been over here.
1. Development as Freedom - Amartya Sen
2. Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and There is a Better Way for Africa - Dambisa Moyo
3. The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It - Paul Collier
4. The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time - Jeffrey Sachs
5. The No-Nonsense Guide to International Development - Maggie Black
6. Just Give Money to the Poor: The Development Revolution from the Global South - Joseph Hanlon
7. The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith - Giblert Rist
8. Theories and Practices of Development - Katie Willis
9. The Value of Nothing - Raj Patel
10. The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good - William Easterly
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