Charlotte is MIA

This is just terrible. I was only cleaning the cobwebs in the corners of our house. The troupes of spiders that dwell among us create these elaborate webs – great for trapping those darn mosquitoes (said, moss-squee-toes) as well as all the dust that lingers in our Dodoma home. I haven’t touched Charlotte’s web since we last reconciled our differences, so her bed was especially dusty. My intent was to just tear down the dusty parts, you know, like help her with her spring cleaning, but I accidentally moved my broom thingy too close to her. She dropped to the floor, or some other place, and disappeared. I looked around the sink, on the floor, behind the light – nowhere to be found. I’m now realizing how attached I’ve become to her. (I am recognizing the insanity of this – if you can recognize you’re losing it means you’re not actually losing it, right? Right.) I think she’s been kind of a pet to me, like a goldfish. They are there solely just to look at – you can’t actually play with them and you don’t really want to touch them. I feel really bad. So bad, in fact, that I felt the need to announce the bad news to Jana. She’s also sad. I’m just going to say some prayers to the spider god that she returns to us. I promise to leave her alone from now on!

Speaking of bugs (or mdudu in Kiswahili – that’s a funny word, don’t you think?), we have an insane amount of cockroaches in our kitchen. That’s mostly where they dwell but sometimes I find a little one in my bedroom closet. They live in our cupboards, crawling all over our spoons, forks, plates, bowls, spices and flour. At first I found this disgusting, but now I find it disgusting that they don’t really bother me anymore. Usually when I open our drawer for a fork, at least five scurry around. I bet John, Carrie, and Greg find this amusing – remember when I used to wake you all up in the middle of the night to kill the spiders next to my bed? And now I comfortably share my bedroom with at least three spiders per ceiling corner, and my kitchen with well over 50 tiny roaches (and a mystery animal that leaves droppings at night). Oh life.

Since I’ve last wrote I’ve done more traveling. I was back at school for about a week after our midterm break trip to Uganda. Sean and I were planning to leave on Wednesday, April 20th to Lushoto, a place up north in Tanzania to meet the other JVs for our “spring” retreat. Unfortunately, Sean starting feeling unwell Monday and by Tuesday evening, he had a horrible fever and was feeling really achy. He didn’t feel well enough for traveling, so I had to decide to go on my own or stay back and wait for him to feel better. To be honest, at first I was really nervous about traveling to Lushoto on my own, mostly because I had never been there and I had to get off at one stop, find a smaller bus, and then get off at another stop and find the place where we were staying. But now after six months of living in Tanzania, my Kiswahili is good enough for me to ask questions and find my way. I figured it best to just go, in case he doesn’t get better as quickly as we’d hoped –and it turned out he didn’t. Sean got typhoid and was pretty ill for about a week. Poor guy. Don’t worry – I didn’t leave him home alone. Jana was still around!

Wednesday morning I woke up at 5am, took a daladala to the bus stand for our 6:30am departure. It was still dark at this time – a really eerie time of day, cold and quiet. But I made it to the bus stand without problem, and drank a shot of coffee with a man from Saudia working for my Shabiby bus, and eventually our bus arrived. My new friend helped me find my seat and put my bag away. I sat a few minutes just sorting out my travel bag (you know, the one that you sit with that includes tissues, snacks, books, music, sweatshirt), when into the bus walks my good friend Redempta. Redempta is the secretary at our school – she’s about 30 and is going to university for a business degree. She was as shocked as I was to see her. She was on her way home to see her family for Easter. She took Sean’s seat and we enjoyed each other’s company for the long trip.

The bus was actually traveling all the way to Arusha, where Redempta was going, but I was getting off in the town of Mombo, cutting the whole trip short by about 4 hours. Redempta helped me find the stop, and at Mombo a nice man turned me over to a small boy who walked me to the coaster bus that I needed to take to my next stop. I told the driver where I wanted to get off, and a nice little Bibi (grandma) sat next to me. Her teeth were mostly tiny and yellow and she had very worn clothes, but her smile was beautiful and she was absolutely delighted as I talked to her in Kiswahili.

The journey from Mombo to Lushoto was a beautiful ride up and through the mountains. Our coaster drove slowly around the narrow bends, and I saw one of the most beautiful sides of Tanzania. It actually reminded me a lot of our trips through the mountains when I studied in China. It’s amazing how peaceful you can feel when viewing nature untouched.

Another friend from the coaster helped me find the Rosmini hostel where we were staying. I’m always amazed at how helpful Tanzanians are, their intentions (most of the time) purely to show a warm welcome. (They don’t take the word “Karibu,” welcome, lightly.)

On Wednesday evening, Thursday, and Friday the other 7 volunteers and I (minus Sean), enjoyed catching up with each other, doing some reflection, sharing experiences, and enjoying the peacefulness of the retreat center. As communities, we take turns running the retreat. The Moshi community was on for this one – Dar and Dodoma will share in planning the next. These retreats are really helpful to give you a space to step back and really examine how life is going. This time helped me recognize how much I have grown already, though I hadn’t realized it, and also helped me to see the changes I needed to start making. I am really grateful for those days.

Saturday morning, in the rain, we waited at our bus stop for about an hour to travel to Moshi for Easter. The trip took about three hours. We stayed at the Moshi volunteer house. Saturday was restful, just enjoying each other, playing games, reading, chatting, cooking meals. That night, four of us slept in tents in the living room – the tents act like a mosquito net. Past volunteers had brought them and left them – thanks, they are quite handy!

Sunday morning we went to Easter Mass but it didn’t seem much different than a normal Sunday Mass to my surprise, considering our Dodoma parish was building much excitement about the day. In the afternoon, a few of us took a nice walk into town and the rest of the day was filled with more chatting and enjoying a lazy Sunday together. We all got excited as each of our phones rang to wish Happy Easter to our families. Liz made us a delicious dinner of veggies, rice, and peanut sauce. Throughout dinner we shared our gratitude ABS’s – each of us listed something we were grateful for for each letter of the alphabet.

Easter Monday I travelled back home very early. My trip had no problems, and I ended up sitting next to a fundi (repairman) who is building our laboratory at school. (I didn’t recognize him – there’s a lot of workers! – but he recognized the mzungu!). Seems like I always meet someone along the way – it’s a small world, isn’t it?

I had school off on Tuesday for a National holiday, so I stayed around home with Sean who was still recovering on our couch. I did some intense cleaning of our living room – I figured it would be something to do while keeping him company. I finally set up our tv/stereo/dvd player that had been sitting around unused for the past 7 months we’ve been here so Sean wouldn’t be so bored. We were so excited that it could play movies! The only one we had was Legally Blonde 2 in the drawer, so we watched it that evening and enjoyed every minute of it! I always forget how nice watching a good movie is – it’s really relaxing and a good way to get your mind on something new. Since then we’ve been searching for movies to watch, but only some work on our dvd player – not sure why. The others come up unrecognized, so we’ve resulted in watching from my tiny computer. It gets the objective accomplished though!

Back to school on that Wednesday and I’m much happier this midterm. At retreat I had come to the conclusion I needed to stop dwelling on the “what could be/ what should be” and instead just find joy in the “what is.” Our students are still the same spoiled brats (okay, not all of them, but some of them!) but they make me laugh and we have fun together. I’m now teaching “speech class” instead of study skills and because I took a class like this in high school, I at least have an idea of how this whole thing can play out. And we’ve (Sean, Madam the English teacher, and I) switched from group teaching a couple English classes every week to pulling out the students who need the most help and giving them one on one (or two on two is more the reality) help with their lessons. We don’t have another holiday until our term break at the end of June, so I’m hoping I can keep up this attitude until then!

Missing everyone from home, as always!