Chapter 3 Tanzanian Tidbits

2012-02-11T12:44:00.000-08:00

Well, between travelling, internet shortages, and power outages I haven't had a lot of internet access these past few weeks. I got to go to Mwanza recently to visit the team there and look at some different NGOs. We've been moving the Groens into their rental house lately, and the guy that Calvin was trying to meet with in Dar Es Salaam went to Dodoma. Hopefully this next week we'll be able to meet with him there. In the meantime, I'd been wanting to write some on Tanzanian food, but that will come later. So here's your:

Tanzanian Tidbits

'mzungu', the word for white person, is from the verb 'kuzunguka', which means to go around in circles or to wander around.
Hygienic euphemisms: 'haja kubwa' = needing a big one = number two, 'haja kidogo' = needing a small one = number one. 'kuchimba dawa' = to bury medicine = to 'go' where no man has gone before.
'kuchapa kiboko' = 'to hit the hippo' = to get someone in line, from the colonial days of using whips made of hippo hide.
Most women here have a really big callous on one of their forearms. This is from leaning on it while they cook, clean, etc. All of their close to the ground work is done bending from the hips and not the knees...pretty strange to watch if they are doing something such as wiping the floor.
The Lake Victoria region used to have a huge cotton industry...before the U.S. started selling them all of our used clothes. Thankfully most women still wear the native kangas and kitenges...the men wear jeans and used t-shirts now.
In church, the greeting is: 'bwana Yesu asifiwe' (Jesus Christ should be praised).
Most Tanzanian fear/respect chameleons, believing witch doctors often embody them to spy on people.
You don't want to be a thief here. I'll just say the result involves tires, gasoline, and matches. And the swahili word 'choma'.
Water: An average tanzanian salary around here (for those who are employed) is about 100,000 /= per month (that's the sign for the tanzanian shilling). That's about $65/month. Around here, to buy 20 liters of water and to have it brought to your house is about 400 /=. Let's say a family of four goes through 80 liters of water / day (that's on the low end). That's 1600 /= per day. Or 48,000 /= per month. People here spend half of their salary on water. The government has been promising city water for a while, but it's taking its time.

Some Swahili sayings that I've heard, and my translation of them:

elimu ni bahadi; haina mwisho.

knowledge is an ocean; it has no end.

haraka, haraka, haina baraka.

there is no blessing in quickness.

kusikia kwa kenge mpaka damu sikioni

Listen for the monitor lizard until you have blood in your ears. Essentially, try until you are defeated.

And just some random info:

Someone said that Kiswahili was born in Zanzibar, grew up in Tanganyika (these two together are now 'Tanzania'), got sick in Kenya, and died in Uganda. When the Germans colonized Tanganyika a while back, they used the local language of Kiswahili for a lingua franca. Now, everyone in Tanzania speaks their tribal language as a kid and eventually learns Kiswahili...only the really educated learn English. However, in Kenya almost everyone speaks English and Swahili... and a lot of Tanzanians make fun of Kenyan Swahili because it isn't 'pure'. In Uganda, the Lord's Army attempted to spread Swahili, and now most people there speak 'luganda' since Swahili is associated with those painful times.

Some Catching Up

2012-01-09T07:40:00.000-08:00

Here's how we're going to do it:

Over the next few days, I'm going to post on the following things:

A general overview of the past 2 months. Pole sana kwa muda mdefu (that's 'i'm very sorry for the long time' in kiswahili).
Tidbits about my experience of the culture.
Some of the most meaningful experiences during that time.
Some of the ideas i've had to wrestle with while i've been here.

These are in defense of my blog being called 'sad', and realizing that it was true.

...let's begin with the overview! It's organized by themes.

Construction at Neema House

Over the past two months, the work up at the property has still been on hold : / The land guy here has been communicating with the head honchos in Dar, but it's taken a while. He's now visited there twice, and we will find out more about his last visit tomorrow. He's dealing with changes to the forest reserve in general, with our property being a subset of that. This past time, he had various influential members of the community write letters to Dar complaining in exchange for them getting plots next to Neema House. Next week Calvin will go to Dar personally to try and push things through. I'd love prayers about this, that his trip would go well and we would get permission to continue now.

Agriculture & Farming

One of the guys (Brett) on the team is implementing sustainable agriculture projects, and we have been working on some of those. A church leader at one of the villages gave him an unused plot of land to use as a demonstration farm, so we've had a few trips out there to prepare the plot and plant.

On top of that, we visited some demonstration farms in Musoma (to the east of Lake Victoria) to get some of Brett's questions answered. I don't know anything about agriculture, so i've been able to tag along to all this and learn more. Brett's also working on testing some chicken vaccinations against Newcastle's disease, so I got to tag along for that.

Visiting Churches

The team here helped some churches start around here, and several of those leaders have been planting other churches recently. In the past two months we've been able to visit several of those churches for holiday celebrations and other occasions. At one point I got to stay a few days with one of the church leaders and see his dispensary (he's a doctor). I got to give injections, learn to diagnose a few things, and help him pull teeth and sew up a wound from a jembe (hoe). It was a great experience, and might have changed some of my thoughts about the future...

Travelling

Steve, one of the workers here, had his Lakizo (month of vacation required in Tanzania) in December, and invited me to come. We went to Bukoba to see his and his wife's families, and spent 9 days out in the villages. More to come on that...

Also, I went on a safari to the Serengeti with Jonathon and Brooklyn Sims, and Brett and his brother Brian. Speaking of...

New People

There have been several people coming and going since i've come.

In November, the Sims (a couple recently out of college) came to visit Geita for seven or so months. They're considering joining the team later, and it's been great having them. Their blog is here: http://www.simsadventures.com/

Also, Brett and Christy Harrison finally got back in November. Brett's brother Brian visited in December, and his sister is visiting later, but Brett and Christy will soon leave for Dar to have their baby.

There's your quick overview! Hopefully I will also be able to start teaching at a secondary school once a week, but that depends on if I can do it with my visa.

Later!

-Craig

Well it’s been a while…a.k.a. African Politics

2011-11-11T03:08:00.001-08:00

I haven’t blogged in a while, partially because I was unsure of what all I should say. Things have been a little confusing here, and it’s taken me a while to get my head around some of it.

Geita is surrounded on three sides by the forest reserve, their version of a national park. The other side is a marsh, which isn’t very conducive to real estate development. All of this poses a problem for city expansion, which is important for a city that’s quadrupled in size in the past fifteen years.

There are three offices that have a say in the boundary of the forest reserve: we’ll call them Land, Forest, and Conservation. Last year two of them, Land and Conservation, agreed to change one area of the forest reserve close to where Neema House was going to be built. If there are 10 levels of officials in a branch, 1 being head honcho and 10 being the local guy, we got permission from something like 1 and 2 of Land and Conservation, respectively. In fact, we even had a letter from the Prime Minister with permission to build. However, Mr. 10 of the Forest branch evidently didn’t get the memo, and when he saw the area getting developed he told Mr. 7, who sent us a cease and desist letter October 19^th. Since that time we have put the construction on hold, waiting for the other two offices to get their act together and talk to the higher ups of the Forest branch. In the States this would have been one call or email, here it’s not that simple.

Thankfully, this week the other two offices put together a letter to take to Dar Es Salaam, where they will sort things out with the border. Hopefully this means that we’ll be able to continue within the next month or so, however you never know with this stuff.

In the meantime, we’ve been working on constructing a workshop for Carson, one of the other missionaries here. He was a contractor for a while back in the states, and he’s finally getting his shop set up here. Later on he’s going to put together some workshops for some of the plumbers and carpenters here on different construction methods.

I’d appreciate prayers that we’d be able to start back up again soon on the construction. We talked to the Social Worker here about starting up operation in a rental facility, but it seems like that would require a five-year lease. Thankfully the team has been here long enough that they have good relationships with a lot of the people in government, and once we finish construction we should be able to jump through a bunch of hoops to get things up and running. In the region there are 40,000 registered orphans, and just last month there was a baby found abandoned in the forest where we are building Neema House. Thankfully it was sent to an orphanage in Mwanza, Forever Angels (check them out online!), but they’ve been above capacity for several years now. The need is here, but things can take a while. Prayers would be awesome.

-Craig

Learning the language...

2011-10-08T10:42:00.000-07:00

My Swahili is getting to the point where I just know enough to be dangerous, and this seems to happen a lot (just substitute 'language' for 'math'):

Visiting a village

2011-10-06T11:18:00.000-07:00

Besides the work on Neema House (the future orphanage), the team here has done a lot of church planting / sustaining here. While Geita is a good sized town (mji), there are several villages (vijiji) close by that the missionaries have worked with on developing churches. And by close by, I mean Africa time...maybe a minimum of a three hour car drive.

A couple Sundays ago Calvin and I went to one of these villages since they were having a celebration meeting of sorts (a jarambe). The drive there was one I will never forget, as the adrenaline rush was better than any roller coaster. Calvin is an experienced driver, so he was comfortable driving around 55 mph on roads with pot holes and ridges amassing over two feet...evidently the trick is to follow the most worn tracks, whichever side of the road they were on. The smoothest ride is usually halfway between the road and the ditch, so most of the time is spent riding at about a 30 degree angle. Passing a car coming the other way converted the windshield's primary function from visibility to dirt protection, and the next 15 seconds would be spent playing whack-a-mole with the road's ridges.

Once we got to the village (Kisero: population 1000, not including goats) Calvin and I met the leaders of the church, and after the greetings and catching up we had lunch. It was a fairly typical (or as typical as I can get, since being an Mzungu means people will always serve you the absolute best food available) yet amazing Tanzanian meal. We had rice, chicken and sauce, and diced cabbage, tomatoes, and onions, with bananas and a Coke for desert. In Tanzania the men usually eat in one room, and the women in another, and so it was me and maybe seven other men participating in this sacred ritual of sharing a meal. When you realize that most of the people around you are eating their best meal in at least a month because you, their guest, has come to visit, it makes every bite you take taste that much better... you realize that you are literally eating an act of love.

After eating, the worship continued. What I failed to mention earlier is where we were: the church 'building' was several tarps held up by wood posts, with Kangas (huge, beautiful pieces of cloth) tied to rope acting as walls around the sides. At the back of this building were five 'pews': planks of wood supported by soccer ball sized rocks. These would later hold around sixty people, but before lunch (chakula cha mchana) they held fifteen awe-faced young kids (watoto) watching us Wazungu (white people) converse with the men (wanamume).

Yohana, one of the leaders of the church, with his son.
His son was kidnapped by a man who had two wives and had not
been able to have kids. This was about a year and a half ago, and they
finally found the boy in Zambia about a month ago (that's around a
six-day trip).

When everyone gathered together we had worship (singing, dancing, and lots of shrills compliments of the women), and Calvin spoke some. We then talked some more about the church with Yohana and others, and ate dinner with them and left.

Random tidbits:

In swahili, the word for 'stranger' and 'guest' are the same (mgeni).
Also, there is no word for 'to have'...that concept is expressed simply as 'to be with':

kuwa = to be
kuwa na = to have (literally 'to be with')

Here's a picture of a lizard in the backyard. the girls named him 'frozone':

Random Tanzanian Tidbits

2011-09-28T10:39:00.000-07:00

Our internet's been out for the past four days, so i'll be trying to catch up some. From my first month here, here's some interesting differences i've seen in Tanzania (and some of them are applicable to developing countries in general):

While we work, the chai lady will come around and sell hot chai (really sweet tea) and mandazis (think unsweetened large donut holes) to the workers. Selling steaming hot tea at noon to people working in the equatorial sun does not sound like a business plan I would invest in, but hey, it's good.
Guys hold hands with guys, girls hold hands with girls. All the time. But don't mix.
Ugali is the food of choice around here, which is essentially cornmeal and water. You eat about a half a soccer ball's worth of it, rolling it in your hand and making an indentation with your thumb, and use that like a scoop.
Right hand is for eating, left hand is for *ahem* other things.
'Shikamoo' is the greeting for people older than you; their response is 'Marahaba'. This is from the slave-owning days where the slave owners would have their slaves say shikamoo (literally 'I hold your feet'). In a lot of the bigger towns people are getting away from it because of its history, but in rural areas it's rude not to say it. Like 'yes sir and ma'am' in the states, but on steroids.
Tanzanian traffic jam = Cow and goat herds (ngombe and mbuzi)
The women here could pretty much whip any construction worker i've met. They can hoe / chop / rake, etc. just as good as the guys, and when it comes to muscles the strength of a guy's biceps is no match for what a woman can carry on her head. And they do all the cooking. And they (or the kids) get the water.
There is red dirt. Everywhere. All my clothes have a ferric tint to them now.
Jambo = the tourist version of hello (they say jambo, and if you say jambo they know you don't speak swahili. If you say 'sijambo', then you get to go through the greeting process)
Jamba = fart
The whole 'try to have an idea where your young child is located' thing isn't very prominent here, so little kids will just wander all over the place. A lot of accidents happen around here because of that.

Tutaonana (we will meet again)!

Some pictures of life here

2011-09-19T10:58:00.000-07:00

Some pics from Tanzania:

The Groen girls. These are the girls of the missionaries I am staying
with, and they are a blessing. When i'm not studying swahili or out
somewhere with their baba (dad), they keep life fun. They constantly remind
me of my two wadada wadogo (little sisters) back home. I miss you, Nicole and Alei.

Steven (or Steveni, since every name seems to have an i (pronounced
'ee') attached to the end. Mine has come out to something like 'Grecky'.)
He is Calvin's right hand man, and helps with all kinds of jobs.
Here he and I were collecting rocks to use as a foundation for the guard
house, and putting them in the ATV.

This is me with my trusty phrasebook; Steven and I were waiting
for the ATV to return to fill it up with more rocks. Note the
hat, gloves, and shoes--all gifts from my dad, and the three
most useful things ever.

This is Kulwa; he works with Brett Harrison, another one of
the missionaries. Here he's laying the rocks for the future
guard house. He and Steven are good friends, and are good about
putting up with my lack of communication. Whenever I can understand
their conversations they are hilarious.

Part of the property...it's been cleared of stumps, and a temporary
fence is up. In the distance to the right is Geita, to the left are the
hills where the forest reserve is located. The big mound on the left is
a brick furnace, and on the right is a stack of bricks Neema House
is going to buy. Some brickmakers had made this furnace on the
property before we started to build here. What they do is dig a huge pit till they
arrive at clay, and after mixing clay, water, sand, dirt, and some other stuff
they let the bricks dry. The bricks are then stacked into a furnace, and they
leave holes in the bottom. After chopping down a lot of trees around the area
they burn the trees under the bricks, close up the holes with mud, and when it's
done firing you have adobe bricks. I'll talk more about all this later...

Work up at the property, or 'polepole'

2011-09-11T08:36:00.000-07:00

One of the interesting quirks of a transition in life is that you get to see your flaws and strengths from a new angle, and you realize that some things will not change just because you switched locations. College doesn't make you work out more. Yes, you will love hanging out with kids in any situation. And no, being in Africa does not change the fact that you take waaayyy too long to write. Anything.

Well, it's been over a week here and I have been getting acclimated into the Groen's schedule. I am currently listening to Celine Dion being blasted by a DJ for a local wedding, and it has been going on all day yesterday and today...or at least whenever the power has been on. Weddings here last pretty much all weekend, and so we have been hearing a lot of Tanzanian Bongo Flava, Celine Dion, and Phil Collins. : )

Anyhow, when I got to Geita last week, Calvin had just begun a lot of the construction, and so most of our time has been spent up at the property working with the guys on the latest projects.

Carpool to work

Some of these projects have included digging up stumps, levelling land, digging fenceposts and putting up fences, and putting up the gate. At times Calvin and I will need to head out to run some errands, such as picking up drinking water, getting loads of sand, cement, and gravel for concrete, or picking up supplies for the gate.

We're out working (tunafanya kazi = we are working) usually from 9 - 5, and during that time only kiswahili is spoken...which means I have gotten much better at 'monkey see, monkey do'. During this time I do have a pocket phrase book, and during breaks in construction I will usually pull this out, consult Calvin, or play 'hii nini' (what is this?) with the guys. Thankfully most of the guys are pretty patient with me, but it still gets amusing. Construction seems to go through several phases.

Phase 1: Everyone is in 'work hard' mode. This also means that, wherever I am or whatever i'm doing, someone is there next to me either trying to take over for me or doing it faster. I enjoy the competition though, and besides, wazungu (white people) are pretty funny when it comes to construction.

Phase 2: The 'hii nini' game. After people are getting tired, they'll start pointing things out to me and telling me what it is in swahili. One of the guys (his name is Focus) has a little broken english, so we'll either act things out or he'll explain it to me. This usually ends in me attempting to use some broken swahili and everyone bursting into laughter at what I just said. After a round of 'polepole's (slowly) about my kiswahili, we all laugh and get back to work.

Phase 3: 'Learn about America' time.
Several times after we have played 'hii nini', some interesting discrepancy will come up between Tanzania and America, and Focus will try to ask me questions about America. Once we had a discussion in which we found out that cameras are twice as expensive in Tanzania, and that Kangas (a traditional cloth that Tanzanian women wear as a skirt, head band, or baby sling) are about ten times more expensive in America. After I attempted to explain the principles of supply, demand, and transportation cost in second grade english, Focus furiously translated everything to the rest of the guys, and an intense discussion was held as we shoveled dirt. Pretty sure there will soon be a new supplier of Kangas to the United States.

Well, we're about to have dinner, so i'll throw some random facts about life here before signing out:

1 dollar ~ 1600 TZ Shillings
I do have electricity and internet, except that the power goes out at least once per day. And I have 4 GB of internet per month, so not much skype. : (
We do have water in the house, we get it from a tank in the backyard, and about once every 5-6 days we have to head into town to fill up from a pump down there, and then pump it from the tank on our trailer up to the tank on the tower. And spoiler alert: I will be helping with the water supply for the Neema House. : )
The bananas & pineapples are amazing here.

Love you all!

Kwa Heri (Good bye)!

Arrived and settled!

2011-09-01T22:20:00.000-07:00

Well, I am finally here! After all the travel and jet lag, I am now sitting at my desk in Geita, Tanzania:

Geita:

Tanzania:

If you want to learn more about Geita, here's a good blurb from Brett Harrison's blog:
http://jamesbrett.wordpress.com/geita-tanzania/

For the next eight months or so I will be living and working with the Geita team, a group of three families who are committed to working with the community here in this corner of God's Kingdom. The three families are the Groens, the Harrisons, and the McNeals, and besides building relationships and planting churches, they are all working on various projects. I am working primarily with the Groens, who are heading up the Neema House. The Groens are Calvin & Alicia, and their daughters Katelyn (11), Sadie (8), and Hailey (6). They don't have a house yet, as they will be living on the Neema House land, so in the meantime we are all staying at the Harrisons' home while they are in the States. The Harrisons (Brett & Christie, their daughter Baylor (1.5), and ?? (-4 months)) are currently on furlough in the States until November, and the McNeals (Carson, Holly, and Jude (1.5)) live a half mile or so down the road from them.

As I said earlier, I will be primarily working with Calvin on the Neema House, which will be a home for at-risk kids in Geita, primarily providing interim care for those up to age five. Although Geita has an enormous orphan population, most of those kids have some semblance of a family network, which they can (hopefully) be integrated into eventually.

As of now, the Neema House consists of some newly acquired land(!), a stockpile of materials, and a whole lot of prayer and work. We are still waiting for the final letter from the government allowing us to begin protecting the land (more on that later), but in the meantime we have been clearing the land and getting it ready to be developed. If you want to learn more about the Neema House, you can check it out at http://neemahouse.org/

Well, it is now time for breakfast, and i'm sure I forgot a lot of things, but more will come soon! If you have any questions or anything, shoot me an email at craigbullington[at]gmail.com, or leave a comment!

-Craig