Tomorrow I move out of Tengeru and into Arusha town. Tengeru is the most beautiful place I could ever hope to live in, I have a great house, I like my Mama and Neema, but I'm moving out nonetheless. It's just too damn far, man. It takes at least an hour to get in and out of town without a cab, and taxi fares have been eating away at my spare funds. There are three new long-term GSC volunteers who just got here and will be living with Arusha, so in moving to town I'm getting easy access to work and play, and people to hang out with. I'm bummed to be leaving Tengeru, and it was awful to have to bridge the subject with Mama Salome last night, but I think this will be a good thing. It's also interesting because I'm moving at the half-way point of my GSC program time, meaning that I'm really facilitating a new and exciting second half.
I've got my bearings now, that much is for sure. After my angry 'mzungu' venting session in my last entry I found a new sort of peace with the whole thing. As I walked home that night fully prepared to punch someone in the nose (a feeling shared at times by my East African counterpart, Miss Anna Chapin of Nairobi) I had a thought: "I really thought I was thicker skinned than this." I've always been overly sensative, but the whole thing was really getting to me. The truth is I had a very lonely first month, and as I've said before, it didn't exactly help for everyone to be constantly reminding me that I was alone. So that night I decided that I had to change tactics. I decided that I would try smiling all day, and if that didn't work, I would try not responding to anyone for a whole day, and the experiments would carry on from there. I just needed to be more consistently calm and happy. I'm in Tanzania for crying out loud! It's amazing here and I've known that, but it's hard to be alone. Happiness wasn't going to come by itself (it never is, I guess) so I had to go catch it. Well, smiling worked. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure you could have told me that blah blah blah aren't you smart. I had to come to it on my own terms. I'm grumpy, okay? I get pissed.
So now when I go through my day I'm sassy smiley: brisk enough to keep people from bothering me, comfortable with ignoring people and rolling my eyes, and generally breezy about smiling. It's not easy, I'm not suddenly some zen guru, but it's a process that I'm now willing to engage in- and it's paying off.
Today was the last day of my first group's HIV training. They were quite the educational experience- for me just as much as them. I taught the majority of today's lesson on nutrition and I was really happy with how it went. This week in itself has been a lesson in the structural shortcomings and easy fixes when it comes to public health and community development.
I hate the term community development. But then, I also kind of hate the term culture. Not really, I just spent too much time with groovy UVMers with fluffy ideas devoid of substance. "Eh, it's their culture. Meh, community development."
This week started to show me what is actually needed, and how many concepts of training skip crucial steps for understanding and value. For example, the group we taught this week had many questions that needed answering, but they had already had an HIV training course last year. So while we were building on their knowledge, thus empowering them to train friends and relatives, these women have had two courses and many women (and especially men) have not had any training at all. We spent part of this morning distributing flyers and there will be announcements at the church this weekend, so hopefully there will be two full groups of newbies next week.
Aright, more musings later. I'm dehydrated.
ppppppppppeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaccccceeeeeeeeeeeee
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