Email No. 11: March 21, 2005 / Back In The Deep South

Dear Fam,

After an extremely busy three weeks I am back at home in Mtwara. I last wrote to you just as I was heading off to do another circle of site visits in the Deep South. The Peace Corps car was down here and so I hopped on with that. Actually, two cars and both the Health and Education APCDs were down here all at the same time, so it was quite a busy week. The two major events of that week for me were staying with Jesse, the first year education volunteer in Newala, and Michelle, the first year health volunteer in Nagaga, a village just 7 km from my old school. It was refreshing and beautiful to be back in Newala again. It always is. Up til the following week of site visits in the Southern Highlands it was the most beautiful place in Tanzania for me. I had a good visit with the volunteer there, but sadly he has just left us this past week to go back to the United States. People ET (Early Terminate) their Peace Corps experience for any number of reasons, but ultimately, it is a choice that a person has to make for themselves. Although, we are all going to miss Jesse, and are extremely sad to see him go, we understand and support his decision to go back home.

After leaving Newala, I headed back on down the hill to see Michelle. She really has the village experience, and although, it's a bit of a rough village, centered upon the 'bus stand' she is doing good things there. I cannot believe how good her Kiswahili is as well! I am extremely jealous of all of these first year health volunteers' Kiswahili skills... they just have to just it so much more than I did and so they are picking up on it really fast. Spending time with both of these volunteers reminded me as to how much of a mental battle being a Peace Corps Volunteer can be. One's world is just so small here, and you can either enjoy that completely or feel really trapped by it. Michelle, like so many of the other PCVs sometimes feels as if she's not doing all that much by being here just now, yet, I was amazed to see all that she was doing when I stayed with her for two days. At the IST conference last week, the PA for health mentioned to the PCVs that "they (the pcvs) were flying, while the people here were crawling, so they had slow down and wait for the Tanzanians to catch up to them in order to see the results of what they were doing" I agree whole heartedly. This group is extremely motivated, which is great, but also makes it tough for them in the short term.

I arrived back to Mtwara on Saturday evening, the 5th of March, only to hop on the plane the 6th of March up to Dar. Pat and I started our site visit trip down to the southern highlands of Tanzania the following day. The Southern Highlands is basically everything south of the main road between Dar es Salaam and Mbeya and is one of the most beautiful places that I have ever been. I had already been to Iringa to visit Martha in my first year here. Njombe and Songea are the two other major towns in this area. They are both beautiful places. Njombe reminds me of home in a way, being cold and up in the mountains. I actually had to wear a wool sweater there in the middle of the day! The standard of living there is so much better than most other places in the rest of the country, and infact even on par with some places in the United States (I'm thinking of houses on dirt roads on the edges of small town America, and older homes that have been there for awhile). Most of the homes are made of stone or brick and remind of me of (extremely ) small cottages. All of that was a crazy realization for me, and while I absolutely fell in love with the area, I was glad that I wasn't placed there. I'm sure that I would have felt cheated of the "roughing it" part of the Peace Corps experience. All of the volunteers down there were doing absolutely great and we took advantage of that fact to do a bit of hiking throughout the week.

Extremely down south, past Songea, and also past Mbinga (if your maps are that detailed) lies a cluster of villages called Maguu (Very close to Mbamba Bay). There are two volunteers that live out here in these bush sites, with no phones, no landlines, one radio call, mail and banking 40km away in Mbinga (none of that actually seems to bad to me, but some people seem to get freaked out by that, especially with cell phone service being as good as it is in this country these days) and a whole lot of coffee and home made apple wine. Maguu lies neslted in the mountains above Lake Nyasa, and it about two hours' walk from the edge of the mountains where you can look out onto Lake Nyasa and the villages of Liule, and Mbamba Bay. Absolutely gorgeous. This place has completely and utterly usurped Newala as my favourite place in Tanzania. It is green, warm in the sun in the afternoons yet cool in the shade, hills lined with Pine and Eucalyptus trees (these are also abundant in Njombe), with coffee being grown in the shade. Actually, it turns out that the area has a contract worked out with Starbucks coffee, although, we know that it ISN"T the Tanzania Peabody blend (we're still trying to figure out what exactly it is called when you see it on the shelves). All of the coffee means that although the area is rural, and the road in and out of there isn't too good in the rainy season, almost ALL of the houses there have tin roofs. Being from the Deep South (which, after this trip, I have decided really is just about the poorest place in the country, they exception being mabybe Singida), all of these tins roofs came as quite a shock to me. Where were all of the straw roofs? The answer lies in the coffee money.

All of the first year Southern Boys are into making their own wines these days based upon whatever fruit they can get ahold of. The current taste in apple wine, which was really good and reminded me of the honey wine at the Ethiopian restuarant in Dar. Who says that these volunteers aren't doing something productive in their spare time??? And more importantly, I'm delighted to find out that there IS someplace in Tz that grows apples and that they aren't all imported in from South Africa.

My last week on the road consisted on IST training in Morogoro for the first year health volunteers and a few days in Dar to catch up on all of the office stuff. IST was really good and I think that the most productive part of it was that the volunteers were able to see each other and share their successes and challenges of being a volunteer thus far. It's good for me to go to things like this as well, because it reminds me of just how strange everything was to me at that time. The "flying and crawling" comment came into play a lot and now I feel like everyone is much more centered and realistic as to what they can expect from themselves in the next short period of time (6 months or so) until their next training.

I am finally home, and really really looking forward to staying here for at least a month. Maybe even two.... =0) Meanwhile, my garden has been growing like crazy while I've been away! That's always something fun to come back to. I'm going to take a few days to settle myself back in again and then dive back into the Femina stuff, meeting with all of the different people in the area. I miss you all!

with love,

jessica