Claudia's Visit

Saturday I was at a boxing class – consisting of all sorts of exercises. Not being accustomed to doing much other than biking, I was very sore for a couple of days after. This isn’t exactly the kind of class that you would go to in the United States. In one of the rooms at the recreation center, a small concrete room which was permeated with the smell of sweat, a group of men do exercises with what equipment they have. One punching bag hangs in the center of the room and tires serve very well to help do sit-ups and a length of fabric wrapped around the knuckles are the gloves.

I wouldn’t have gone to this class except that Claudia was staying with us for the weekend. After she finished language school the week before, she went to work in Buhemba, a village that is about an hour from Musoma by public transportation: daladala (little busses – Toyota Hiaces that are loaded up with people) or pikipiki (motorcycle). While she was in Musoma, she went to these classes more often, now she is only here for the weekend. She had responded to my text inviting her to dinner with a request to borrow a bed. I think she was planning to just stay the one night, but she ended up staying all weekend.

Claudia loves talking with anyone and everyone that she sees. She only had a five-week course at the school, which wasn’t enough for her to perfect her Swahili. She’s from Switzerland and her accent is clear whenever she speaks Swahili in her “R,” too, but she doesn’t let that stop her. Biking out to the Peninsula, the same one I visited last year with Pineapple Fishstick and Daniel, with her was great – and a great opportunity to speak Swahili. We climbed on the rocks on the edge of Lake Victoria and found out that the fishermen use chicken as fish bait. We have a drink on the peninsula while it rains a bit, along with Jonathan, another mzungu who just got back from a trip home to England and would stay at our house for the night before returning to his school in the village (welcome to our hotel. Good thing we have three extra beds). This weekend reminded me of what I ought to be doing. Claudia seems to be constantly talking to random people and I wish I had someone to go do these random things with normally. No, my mom doesn’t count.

Mwanza

I realize I’m almost a week slow on these blog posts, but I don’t imagine it should make too much of a difference so I won’t be getting any more prompt, probably.

Saturday morning, we intended to get an early start for the trek down to Mwanza and, although not the 6am departure my mother had initially been aiming for, it was still pretty early when we were leaving Musoma in Robi’s blue Land Cruiser. It’s a three-hour drive and the road, while pretty good by Tanzanian road standards, has sections in which there are many holes, not to mention the bikers carrying all manner of things that must be avoided. Luckily there are not that many other vehicles on the road but I am sure the driving experience is still a bit stressful so I don’t envy my mother for having to drive the whole thing since I don’t have my Tanzanian driver’s license.

Well we arrived in Mwanza and luckily the store we were looking for to buy the oven was right off the main street because otherwise we would have had to stop and ask directions. We park, pay the woman with the bright vest 500 shillings and go into the store. Pretty uneventful there: buy the stove, pay for it, talk to the shop owner about selling the solar lights and solar phone chargers – he’s interested in the chargers but already has the lights. We talk with him a bit and he tells us to pull up in front of the store – putting the oven in the car wouldn’t take long enough for them to chain the car something that, he warns us, happens if you’re parked illegally even if you don’t know it. So I wait while my mom tries to go around the block to pull up in front of the store but actually ends up going around half the city and pulling up in front of the store. We load up the oven in the back, and then, though we aren’t actually parked, my mom runs back to the other store right here, Zara Solar to see if they’re interested in the solar chargers. In the meantime, the truck that had been unloading in front of us finishes and drives off, leaving us obviously not legally parked whereas before it was not nearly so obvious.

Although my mom had only been away from the car for one minute, a man comes up and begins chaining a boot on the car. At first I don’t recognize him as a parking cop in his dark blue jumpsuit when he approaches the car, but then I see what he’s doing. I tell him we aren’t actually parked here and when he asks for the driver, I run to get my mom, 20 feet away, who quickly picks up the charger and runs back to the car. She hops in and starts the engine but it is too late – the boot is on the wheel and, they warn her, will ruin the tire if you try to move. She pleads with them at first nicely, then desperately, then angrily but ends up having to pay the 50,000 shilling (currently ~$39 at 1300/= per USD) parking ticket.

This is especially unfortunate because we were running low on shillings already. At first I am worried that she would let that one parking ticket ruin her day, but after a nice lunch at a nice hotel (for wazungu apparently, because everyone eating there seemed to be) right on Lake Victoria, her mood was much improved and we began looking for fabrics and the other things that my mom had in mind to buy to make life here a bit more like life in the US.

First: store with many kitchen things conveniently across the street from our parking spot. We buy knives and a cutting board. Second: main street looking for fabric stores. Some of them appear to be closed but we find one that is open and look through the fabrics piled on the tables and the shelves spanning the walls from floor to ceiling. I buy one 12m piece with puzzle designs. Back to the car. Grocery store to get some things we can’t get in Musoma – even at Kotra (my mom rightly equates it to a 7-11 in the US, but it is the best supermarket here in Musoma and the only place to buy cheese and butter). Next stop, the bank: we are down to 15,000 shillings between us.

Our wallets thus replenished, we head to the market, which is quite a bit larger and yet more tightly packed that Musoma’s. Last year when we visited Mwanza, we missed the market, seeing only the bus station on the edge of it, but this time we wend our way through the food stands among the throng people buying and selling pretty much everything. Past the area where all the food is sold, the crowds are less dense and we look at a couple of piles of fabric in front of the shops. One man has good taste in fabric (they must choose which of the large pieces to buy and cut them up to 4m to sell them) and we buy four different designs from him – I choose three for the pants and my mom chooses one for herself. We continue down through the market, past the strangest assortment of things – much of it of the cheap Chinese variety of almost everything here. Peeler and cheese grater are checked off the list. We also get some silverware that is much nicer than the cheap Chinese set we have at home that is not holding up to any use at all. It isn’t yet four and we’ve fulfilled all of that for which we had come to Mwanza. We walk back to the car, silverware clinking in the bag, and depart for Musoma.

We arrive back in Musoma shortly after the sun has set, which means that the last few speed bumps were not fun. It had rained a little bit toward the end of the drive back but it isn’t raining now. We decide to take advantage of having the car to go to dinner at Tembo beach, a hotel/campsite/restaurant right on Lake Victoria. We are sitting down at a table outside when I notice by her accent and the silhouette of her profile against the lake that ahead of us is definitely Claudia, one of the other students at the school who had finished her 5-week course the day before. She’s sitting with Father Makarios, or Mak for short, another student at the school and we join them.

They’re both very fun and it is a good dinner, which we eat inside due to the rain that approached, complete with lightning, before dinner. We talk about the African experience in general, Claudia’s work around an hour away and Mak’s in Nairobi, we also discuss classes some, and Mak makes jokes about some of the other students. His favorite target is Melodie, the other Unitedstatesian student – a loud woman from Arkansas. After the after-dinner whiskey that Claudia ordered, we all head back to Mak’s room at the language school because we were giving him a ride anyhow, although it was a tight fit for Claudia in the back with the oven. We hang out there for a while and Father Mak (Be careful, or he’ll send you to room 18, Melodie’s room) pours some more whiskey for everyone, that’s one of those things you can only get at Kotra.

And we head home.

Habari za Siku Nyingi

Let me translate that for you: it means news from the last several days. Ok, literally it means news of many days, but that just doesn’t work in English. Last blog post, I was talking about school, and not much has changed since then. I’m still in the class with sisters Cinzia and Maria we seem to switch teachers every week, a good thing because some of them are more competent than others and it is good to have a variety of perspectives and accents for the various parts of the lesson (conversation, story, grammar and exercises). Outside of school, I haven’t been doing much. I go into town to buy food at the market, go to the Anglican at lunch and hang out at home at the compound.

Weekends are especially relaxing, reading in the sun or on the porch in the hammock even if the power is out, which it often is on the weekends – apparently Tanesko (sp?), the utility here, doesn’t run the generators because the demand is low. It makes it difficult to cook food if the sun isn’t out, though. We only have a couple of electric burners and a solar cooker right now but we are going to get a gas oven in Mwanza tomorrow, Saturday, so that will fix that problem. With the rainy season practically upon us, that is a relief because the solar cookers, which we had been relying on for food and tea on the weekends, will be considerably less useful if it’s raining. .

Speaking of the rainy season, we had an amazingly intense storm the other night. Evening was approaching and I looked out the window and the world was yellow. It was the strangest thing. Walking across the compound, my eyes adjusted to the strange coloration, but from inside, the contrast of the white walls inside as compared to the white walls outside (which were yellow) it was quite a trippy experience. Soon, though, it became obvious that the yellow sky was just a warning of the storm to come. Lightning lit the sky and thunder pounded the ears and the rain was loud on the roof. I was only worried about the bike ride to school the next day. My mom would not be going to school the next day, for the second day, but I would either be biking in the rain or on a muddy road. As it turned out, I had nothing to worry about: the sky was clear and bright the next day, and the road was astonishingly dry, only a few puddles betraying the storm of the previous night. I already need to be alert for loose patches and potholes in the road every day, so the puddles don’t even affect my morning bike ride. .

Why did my mother not accompany on that bike ride to school? She was staying home to recover from malaria. The illness is so common here that the two teachers who presently have it are still teaching. This being my mother’s first time to have malaria, though it was somewhat of a bigger deal for her. Taking everyone’s advice, she took two days away from school to fully recover in order to not simply go right back to being sick. She ate nothing but fruit during that time. Her symptoms were not too extreme, for malaria. Luckily she caught it early and started taking the medicine after the test told us she had 2 rings, a measure of the severity (the lower the number the better). One student at the school had just recovered from malaria 6, which is quite bad, but the more severe cases can be much higher than that. After her two days of rest, she was back up today, Friday, and our neighbor gave us a ride to school to aid in my mom’s recovery. I’m glad to report that she is feeling much better and is off her fruit diet and back to normal food. Hopefully she is completely recovered because we have an early morning tomorrow going to Mwanza for the day.

Beginning Shule ya Lugha – language school

Last Monday, upon returning from Nyamaguku, my mom called Father Edward, the director at the language school, to find out if our classmate had arrived and we would start school. She was to arrive the following evening, but he invited us to start on the next morning anyhow, one day before Sister Maria would join us on Wednesday. Luckily, Sister Maria is familiar with Swahili, having been in Tanzania and Kenya for the past few months so we do not need to repeat the grammar lessons that we learned the day before she arrived. That first week, we finished the first lesson – actually doing every single exercise twice because one of our teachers decided to start them all over when we reached the end, something that apparently he wasn’t supposed to do. That paired with the fact that I had already learned everything we were taught made that first week of lessons go a bit slowly, which led to the creation of this doodle.

So if last week was too easy then this week may be just the opposite. Over the weekend I had been warned that I was moved to a higher class. On Monday morning I arrive, hot from the 15 minute bike ride, and find out that I am in the same class as Sister Maria and Sister Cinzia (Italian. Pronounce cheen-tsee-ah.) – a very fun and energetic person who seems to have a good grasp on the language already. We are slowing her down, really. She has already done lesson five and we just went back to lesson four – skipping two lessons for us but I guess there was no other class to put her in.

I feel like I am making good progress, though. Monday morning I was intimidated because I felt like I had a lot of catching up to do. Sister Maria and Sister Cinzia both seemed far better at speaking and understanding the language than I was. And they are, but even just one day later I feel like I am improving. I know that I have a long way to go and I also know that both of my classmates can speak and understand spoken Swahili better than I can right now because they’ve both been here for the past few months or a year, but I am no longer worried about getting left behind. I feel good about my progress and know that it will just take practice speaking and listening to catch up Sister Maria, not in grammar (we are at the same level in grammar) but in fluency. So for now, I continue going to school all morning with catch-up classes in the afternoon to be at sister Cinzia’s level and then we’ll see if it isn’t more efficient to take the afternoons for myself. The time is meant for the language lab, listening to the day’s lesson on tape but I’ll have the tapes or their digital equivalent at home and I may find something more interesting and useful to fill my afternoons – save to tapes for the evening. Although I could certainly fill my life with nothing but learning the strange language, like some students that live at the language school seem to, almost never leaving the place. But I don’t need to be in Tanzania to do that: I could be anywhere. I want to be here. We’ll see what happens.