Email No. 8: November 22, 2004

Hello all, how was your weekend? I ended up being really busy with all of the site announcement stuff and getting ready for this Head of School's conference this week. I think that I wrote you a little bit about the new volunteers that I'm going to be getting in my area, but maybe not. I still get a bit confused as to what I write to whom these days. We are getting 11 new volunteers down in the deep south this year. I am so excited to work with all of them! They are 8 health volunteers and 3 education volunteers, but unfortunately, my site is not being replaced. They didn't have enough Biology teachers to fit all the schools' needs and Ndwika really needed Biology and not any other subject. They will probably put another teacher there in a year or so. I am finding that I am really becoming passionate about all of the health stuff I am doing with Peace Corps these days and I am really looking forward to working with the health volunteers. They are a great group, really motivated and excited! My new neighbor is named Danielle. She is rather quiet, but I think that we will get along great and have a lot of fun together. She's going to be working with the District Council.

I just found out this week what the other half of my job will be for next year. In addition to doing volunteer support stuff and helping the new volunteers get resources and communicate with the office, I'm going to be working with an NGO called the Femina HIP project... Health Information Project. The biggest thing that they do is publish a magazine half in Kiswahili and half in English called Femina. It's a quarterly magazine that they provide 50 free copies to about 200 secondary schools and sell other copies in Dar es Salaam and other big cities. The magazine talks about HIV/AIDS prevention and all kinds of puberty/ coming of age issues and trys to have interviews with whoever the current Bongo Flava music star is. It rocks! Especially as Tanzania really has such a culture of silence when it comes to talking about such issues. In the past couple of years, they have started publishing a new magazine called "Si Michezo" (It's not a game), which is written entirely in Kiswahili, more simplified Kiswahili at that, and aimed more at primary schools and out of school youth. They have piloted this second magazine in the Deep South and other rural regions and I'm supposed to help them monitor how the magazine is being used and received. I'm really excited about it, cuz hopefully, I'll get to talk to a lot of people and ask them a lot of questions and dig even deeper into this culture. I have a meeting with the NGO next friday in Dar to discuss all that it is they want me to do. I'm getting really excited to as everything is starting to come together for next year.

I just spent all day sitting in on this year's Head of School conference and it has me really excited for all of the things that the health volunteers are going to be doing this year. PC is changing their approach to Health Education a bit this year, trying to educate the "big potatoes" in addition to the kids in hopes that the kids will follow by example and that the Heads of Schools and District Officials will start to speak out a bit more. It's been shown that once national and other leaders start to speak out then things start to change. It will be interesting to see how it goes.

On the other hand, it looks like Tanzania will be continuing to fight an uphill battle in the upcoming years. Last year, President Bush put together something called PEPFAR to provide money for HIV/AIDS prevention in Africa. Tanzania is an African country that is getting PEPFAR monies and although this looks like a good thing on the surface, I really think that it will make some things worse. PEPFAR is the President's Emergency Plan For Aid's Relief. Some of us in PC TZ has dubbed it as President's Egostical Poorly Founded Anti-Relief, and here's why: The whole plan comes with all sorts of stipulations for supplying funds for only Abstinence and Faith-Based HIV/AIDSprevention plans. This means bad news for organizations like PSI (Population Services International) in Tanzania, which are the makers of the ONLY affordable condoms in the country. Through subsidies which they will no longer be able to receive because of PEPFAR stipulations, they have been able to produce quality condoms and sell them to the public for the US equivilant of 10 cents for a pack of three. That sounds like a ridiculously low price, but considering that a lot of villagers in my area survive on the equivilant of 50 cents per day, it's actually dead on or even, a bit expensive. Now because PSI is going to have its funding cut because of PEPFAR, the price of condoms is going to sky rocket. In the two years I have been here, I have only ever seen the PSI brand of condoms for sale (Salama condoms) in the Deep South. In the big cities, I have seen others, but they cost the equiviliant of about $1- for a pack of three. The situation just spells disaster for the whole AIDS prevention effort here and gets me so angry! It's not to say that there aren't other prevention methods besides using condoms (Like, just don't have sex), but they don't work within the cultural boundaries. So yeah, the next couple of years will be an uphill battle with the situation becoming even more serious, which makes talking to role models and people in positions of power like these heads of schools all that much more important. I am curious and excited to see what the next two days of this conference will bring as all of the participants were really receptive today.

Wow! So that's enough of that. I am excited to see many of you in just a few weeks! Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to you now if I don't get to see you.

With love,

jess