Wednesday
Poor Julia.
She runs off to school while I get up
slowly each morning. Today I showered (I
don’t shower every day here because of all the trouble it takes, but I get quite
a bit dirtier here than I do America).
One of the busses broke down, so we were short about 30 kids and 3
teachers.
Good thing she’s got a roommate who’s
looking for a new way to put off working on her project for school!
I got super excited because Julia
promised me I could read the kids this super cool counting book that Ryan’s mom
found. It counts in Swahili and talks
about all the animals in Tanzania and calls them by their Swahili names. It’s probably the coolest thing I brought on
my trip!
I also got pretty excited about teaching
the kids science, since it’s my favorite subject and the kids all think I’m a
doctor (they know I’m not, but again, there’s no word for PA in their
language).
I was flipping through the 3rd
grade science book the other day and I learned so much: methods of HIV/AIDS
transmission (they conveniently left out the big one), that you should let your underwear soak for
20 minutes in wash water before rinsing it out, then you should iron everything.
Guess I’m not smarter than a Tanzanian 3rd
grader.
And I’m walking around wearing dirty
underwear since I only let mine soak for 5 minutes before rinsing them…
Just as I’m walking to school with my
book, belly full of oatmeal from the guest house and chi from the kitchen, the
lost bus pulls up. It’s supposed to hold
about 15 people, but it’s carrying about 30 kids and our missing 3 teachers.
And a few loaves of bread, which the
children chase down the bus for.
Guess I’m going to work on my project
today after all.
But first, I walked with a sweet girl
named Veneranda who walks with the assistance of a cane. All the other kids ran after the bread and
she looked unsure if she should go after some too. After confirming that she did want bread, I
asked if I could walk with her. She
smiled and said yes. Awesome!
I learned that she wants to be a “sister”
when she grows up, but I’m not really sure what that means in this
context. She’s in grade 3 and she likes
art class.
Although, all the kids leave art class
covered in glitter, so I’m pretty sure they all like art class.
After walking with her to get bread and
back to her classroom, I returned to work on my project. I got about 30 minutes in when I got bored
and remembered I promised Julia I would do laundry today. I’m out of clean shirts and skirts, so I
really actually needed to do laundry.
It looked like rain, so I wasn’t sure
about washing, but I figured if it did rain I my clothes would just get rinsed
by rain water, which I guessed is just as clean as what comes out of the tap
here (that smells like the lake).
And I’d be sure to soak my underwear for
20 minutes this time…
After finishing, I went back and
successfully worked on my project for the rest of the morning, and got partly
done with my second paper analysis.
Thank you Jesus!!
…………………………………………………………
So, this weekend Julia, Stephanie and I
are planning a girls weekend in Mwanza.
Chris, the guy who owns the Children’s home, has a friend Jan who
jointly owns the farm in B?? that we stayed at last weekend. Jan also owns a hotel in Mwanza called
Tunza. They’re having a Halloween party
this weekend and we’re going to stay the night in a beach-front bungalow on
Lake Victoria.
So, it’s always a challenge to find a
Halloween costume in America that’s creative and fun but not really expensive
or really skimpy. But at least in
America you have endless supplies at your fingertips.
We don’t have that here.
Stephanie, being the creative Art teacher
she is, decided we should be butterflies.
We all, coincidentally, have black leggings and black tank tops. We were going to fashion some wings out of
Konga (basically 2 yards of bright fabric) stretched between thick, shaped
wire.
Which sounds like fun, but the wire we
have is actually extra barbed wire from a fence project and I wasn’t too
excited about Julia’s idea to just cut off all the barbs.
So we nixed the butterfly idea.
We floated through a series of costume
ideas and decided on Greek goddesses. We
all have white bed sheets that we can make into togas. Stephanie had the kids make hair wreath
things a week or two ago, and we can use that for our hair. We rummaged through things until we found
rope to tie around our waists! And Stephanie has face paint that she’s determined
to use!
[kids with head wreaths that look slightly Greek goddess ish]
Perfect, we thought.
Then we noticed how many people here walk
around in similar outfits (long cloth wrapped around them). We thought that maybe since the Masai walk
around in basically cloth attached to them with a belt, we might appear to be
making fun of them if all we wore was a bed sheet wrapped around us attached by
a belt for Haloween.
So, the toga idea was also nixed.
Because no one is brave enough to mess
with the Masai.
Stephanie has a wide array of tie-died
clothing with her. She’s got a long
story behind it, basically ending in that’s what she could find when she went
shopping. She was running in a tie-died
Konga one day (because you have to always wear a skirt here, even when running)
and it ripped. So now we have 2 yards of
tie die material at our fingertips. She
thought it would be fabulous to be hippies from the 70s. I’m not sure if the 70s hit East Africa like
they did in America, but at the very least, we’ll be bright, colorful, and
matching, which should be fun.
Assuming this idea sticks.
…………………………………………………………
I’ve acquired a new skill.
I’ve learned to speak Swahili. Fluently.
Only, I can’t do it when I’m awake. According to Julia, she heard me say “Karibu!
(Welcome)” last night in the middle of the night.
Now if I could just channel those
thoughts in the daytime, I’ll be set!
……………………………………………………………
Jonas is Chris’s 2nd oldest
adopted son. His oldest, Seleh, is in
America ringing the Liberty Bell and raising money to keep the Children’s home
and school running.
Jonas recently read “Where the Red Fern
Grows.” Classic young adult book. But a difficult one for a kid who’s 3rd
language is English.
Being the good student he is, he kept a
journal with all the new words he came across and he gets visitors to translate
them periodically.
While I was pulling my laundry off the
line to fold it, I helped him translate some words to Swahili. I would compare it to playing the game Taboo.
I’m decently stellar at the game
Taboo. Ryan can vouch for me. I was really excited to play this new,
Swahili version with Jonas.
You have a word that you have to describe
to your teammate, only there’s a bunch of words you can’t use (only the words I
can’t use aren’t written out for me, they’re just words Jonas also doesn’t
know).
For instance, translate the word
eerie: I tried to use spooky.
Buzz.
Then creepy. Also Buzz.
How about scary. Yes! We have a winner! We can move on to a new card.
Some of the words were kinda hard, in the
way that they could mean two different things.
Like the word “winged.” It could
be used to describe a bird or an aircraft, as a winged object. Or it could be used to talk about how we had
no idea what to make for dinner, but we walked into the kitchen, grabbed some
supplies, and winged it, or came up with something on the spot.
I gave him both translations. I didn’t have the word in context.
Other words on the list: Kernels,
superstition, screech, apron, liquor, and my personal favorite “snort.”
I asked Jonas what sound chickens made in
Swahili. Because I remember from Spanish
class some animals make different noises in Spanish than in English. But chickens make the same noise in English
and in Swahili. So I figured pigs
probably do too. I told him sometimes in
America pigs make the noise “oink” and sometimes they snort.
It’s like when you pull air through your
nose and make a noise. That’s a
snort. I didn’t tell him about the
translation for snort that people do with drugs. I figured that wasn’t what they meant when
they used the word snort in “Where the Red Fern Grows.”
…………………………………………………………………
Last night, when Julia woke up in the
middle of the night to charge her computer.
I really still don’t know why, but apparently it worked.
I got up to go potty, like a normal person
might do in the middle of the night.
The lights were on when I walked through
our living room to the community bathroom.
I flipped the switch to turn on the single light in the entire bathroom,
and instantly all the lights in the house turned off.
Nice move.
We flipped a series of light switches,
and it seems I turned out all the lights in the house, permanently. No problem, we’ll just go to bed and fix our
power issues tomorrow.
Now, switch the scene to tonight. Julia and I both remember back to last night
when we flipped I flipped all the lights off unintentionally. Julia gets the bright idea to reset the
breaker box.
And suddenly we have lights again, but no
main bathroom light, which is a problem because Julia wants to take a
shower. She flips on the bathroom light,
which throws all the lights off.
We go back to the breaker box to reset it
again, but it won’t reset. Julia (who is
the only one that can reach the breaker box, they practically put it on the
ceiling here) can’t flip the switch up.
I looked and Julia had the bathroom light
switch in the on position. She thought
that if she left it on, she could trick the lights into all being on when she
reset the breaker box. But I explained
that the breaker box wouldn’t reset with that light on because that’s what is
throwing off all the lights in the first place.
Not that I know much about electricity,
but I’ve had to flip a few breaker box switches back in the day when I
lifeguarded so I figured that’s how they worked in Africa.
Turns out, when we flipped the bathroom
light switch down, we had no problem turning on all the other lights in the
house. We tried unsuccessfully to get
some of the lights in the bathroom stalls and showers to work, but we could
only get the lights to work in the showers that didn’t drain or didn’t have
cold water. So Julia opted for a warm
shower in the dark stall that has no door.
It’s funny though, this shower feels ten
times more refreshing than the showers I take in America. Probably, I figure, since I get ten times
dirtier here.
…………………………………………………………………..
We ate dinner with the kids tonight. We heard that it was probably not rice and
beans, that it might be potatoes and bananas and that sounded fabulous to me.
It turned out to be Ugale (cornmeal
mush), beans, and meat. Ok, not
Ugale/rice and beans, but close. Still,
the meat added a new flavor and I was pretty thankful for that.
Until I bit into the meat.
Whoever came up with the saying “chew
your food 28 times before swallowing,” has never had African meat. Across the board, I’ve not had meat here that
you can swallow without chewing at least 100 times.
I chewed so long that the meat lost most
of its flavor, which was only decent to begin with. I looked around.
I wasn’t the only American sitting in the
room that was chewing over and over again seemingly unsuccessfully. I was thankful I had only put a small chunk
of meat on my plate.
I’m grateful the kids get meat sometimes,
and in the future I’ll be happy to let them have it all. When I first got here, I thought I had to
finish all the food on my plate whether I liked it or not. After all, these kids once were the “starving
children in Africa” our mothers always told us about.
But Julia and Stephanie let me in on a
great way to ensure there are less hungry kids in the world. You tell the children “karibu (welcome)” and
hand them your plate. They dive at it
and finish it off, then they fight over who gets to take it to the sink for
you.
Perfect.
Except that my mouth felt all waxy when
we finished dinner. That’s funny. I asked Julia, who again, is like my personal
guide to all things Tanzanian, and she told me it was fat.
From the meat.
Wince.
Eeew.
Needless to say, I finished off the last
of the bag of Chocolate Covered Sunshine (Raisinettes) I brought with me to get
the taste out of my mouth.
But realistically, I had to finish them
before the mouse got to them, so it worked out wonderfully!
……………………………………………………………..
So, headlamps are generally great. I was kinda bummed that I left mine in
Zambia, but I guess God knows better than I do.
While walking home from dinner, I used Julia’s headlamp, and just for a
good time, I put it on my head.
And then ate a bug.
Bad idea.
The headlamp was promptly removed from my head and the swarm of bugs
followed suit. Thankfully.
…………………………………………………………
While we charged our computers and worked
that evening, Chris’s sons watched The Polar Express.
It’s officially October 26th
and I foolishly thought I might make it all the way to mid-November this year
without hearing Christmas music.
Usually, my friend Diana is the first one to get me to listen to
Christmas music, either with a mixed CD or in her car. But someone beat her to it this year.
I think it was worth it, just to see
Chris’s youngest son, Danny (who doesn’t know his real age because he was found
with no parents or birth certificate or anything), but we guess he’s around 8,
sit straight up the entire time, eyes wide, staring at the movie. Everything he does is “the best thing ever.”
Seriously, this kid couldn’t stop saying
“Asante Sana (thank you so much)” when we let him grate our cheese the other
day. Like grating cheese for someone is
something special.
I found myself thanking God that he made
each child to be something special.
………………………………………………………………….
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