New Community

Here is is – the official start of year two and all the wonderful changes that come with the second year of this experience. Our new JVs have finally arrived – Cristina and Hannah!! - and we're officially in our new home. Cristina arrived in Dar on Monday morning, Hannah on Tuesday morning, and the Dar folks put them on a bus to Dodoma on Wednesday – poor girls! But they arrived in good spirits! After school on Wednesday, Marty, Sean, and I drove into town to pick them up and make our final move to the new house. We packed up Marty's Pajero with our bedsheets and final things, drove to the new place to drop everything off, and got a call from the girls that they should be arriving within the hour. Maybe it was a little foolish to try to officially move into that house the day they arrived, considering nothing was set up, nothing was really cleaned, and we only had mattresses, but at the same time I think Sean and I wanted to get this new community started with Cristina and Hannah as soon as possible, and what a better way of doing that than a little bonding in an empty house that will eventually become our home!

But even though we were all entering this dirty, empty house together, I was channeling my inner “Nance” (it's a quality I'm glad I inherited, Mom!) and decided to stay home and at least give the living room a good sweeping and moping before we slept on our mattresses on that floor. I think it was a little therapeutic for me to be alone in that house and mentally prepare for what I could absolutely not mentally prepare for – a completely, radically different year than the one that came before.

Marty and Sean finally arrived with two smiling (and shiny) faces (those bus rides are rough!), and it was a little surreal to help them move their things into the house. We've had many white-faced visitors come through Dodoma, but none that stayed longer than two weeks. Marty treated us to a nice dinner at the Pizzeria that is conveniently now walking distance from our house, and we chatted and laughed about life in the States, preparations before coming, funny fears of our friends, Washington D.C. (Cristina lived there for a few months), and San Francisco (where Hannah is from). It was a really nice evening.

When we got back to the house Cristina, Hannah, and I set up our mattresses with a few sheets under the fan in our living room. I remembered how hard it was for me to sleep the first few weeks of living in this country because of all the foreign noises outside (roosters in the morning, dogs at night, cows mooing, people talking in an unknown language, loud Bongo music), that I figured a nice “impromptu” sleepover would be fun for the first few days. Unfortunately it was impossible to set up mosquito nets, which I hadn't even thought of – one year malaria free! - but fortunately the house has pretty good screens so we weren't really bothered. Cristina, however, is experiencing much of the biting that I had when I first arrived, but she came prepared with a mosquito-tent-thing (which we are still laughing about) but it really helped her.

We were all so tired that I think we slept through the whole night, besides the early morning when we heard this ridiculous bird chirping almost inside of our house. It wasn't until a few days later, and a few more times of hearing this bird that we realized the bird is actually our doorbell which is connected to the gate!

Thursday morning Sean and I had to go to school for the last day of exams in the morning, and the girls got a ride in the afternoon to the school to be around for our faculty meeting and end-of-year staff get-together. Now as I'm thinking back at that staff meeting, I'm incredibly surprised at how far we've come as a staff, and how differently our colleagueship looks and I'm very happy about that. I think a lot of my own actions, assumptions, and ego had a real affect on how others interacted with me, and even though I thought I was always being “culturally sensitive and aware,” it is quite impossible for that to be your entire reality. I often got tripped up in the justice of my own existence here, the respect I deserved, when the reality of living in someone else's culture means you give up that privilege in order to respect them first. I wonder how this translates to my future work-life back in the States.

After the meeting where we recapped the year, the goods and the bads, we headed to the Jesuit residence with the rest of the staff for “snacks,” which ended up being close to a full meal (pork, 'chips,' salad, ground nuts, fried sweet bananas), and drinks, and music. I love how music and dancing is such a part of celebrating here. Turn it on and someone will stand up and start moving. I remember the first months of being here how uncomfortable that was for me, but now it feels so natural. So what you're the only person dancing! It's so normal. Life is meant to be enjoyed – so stand up and enjoy it!

Friday was house cleaning day for basically the entire day. We did extreme sweeping, mopping, washing walls, and dusting things that probably were never dusted. We had a blast! We just pumped the jams, told silly stories and enjoyed creating our new home. The cleaning actually lasted the entire next week, but at the end of that day we successfully pealed the layers of someone else's house off and could see the glimmer of our home coming through.

Our house has two showers, one with a faucet at our waist and the other with a tall shower head in the bathroom in Hannah's room. So bucket showers have finally become part of my daily life here in Tanzania – a very welcomed change. It's incredible how little water you truly need to take a decent shower. Anyways, Sean and I thought it would be a fun treat for our new community mates to go to the "Cathedral" (Club 84) for their first introduction to Bongo-flava and the dance culture of Tanzania. I absolutely won't go to this club unless our friend David comes along - he just makes the whole experience 100% more enjoyable for me - and thankfully he was totally on board. After our bucket showers, we all settled for a dinner on our floor sitting on the mats made by David's grandmother in Uganda (still waiting for a dinner table and all other furniture).  Though the club is now even closer than it was to our other house, it started to rain and so we took a taxi down the road.  The night was fun, though, and we all came back exhausted.

We slept in on Saturday and took a daladala in the afternoon to Mnadani, the meat market about 20 minutes outside of the city.  We treated the girls to their first plate of goat meat.  That was the perfect ending to our first few days together.