Letter No: 2, October, 2002

Dear Family, Hijambo? Habari za leo? (Hi! How was your day?)

So, I'm halfway into week 1(last week was week 0, since it was only a half week), and I'm starting to feel slightly more comfortable. I made it home from training today without getting lost, managed to properly greet Mama Stella, and even bought stamps at the post office. I'm beginning to understand the layout of Arusha and the dala dala's (Mini-buses designed for 9-12 people, which seat 30+).

I'm sitting at the kitchen/living room table and watching the sun start to set, I'm still amazed at how rural this seems to me, even though I'm in the middle of Tanzania's second largest city. It just seems so much simpler, and yet, I can see how hard people work here. The PC is only paying our families $65 a month or so to help offset my costs. On the one hand, that's more than adequate to pay for my food and necessities, but it's also not a lot. Then again most people only make about half that a month.

There's a routine that goes with everything here. The sun rises and sets at 6am -pm pretty much the year round. Training starts at 8am and since it takes over an hour to walk there, I get up at 5.50am every morning. Mama Stella has a house girl and boy, so I get up and give her my bucket, which she fills with boiled water, and I get to bath with. I eat breakfast and chai, then go to training.

At training we get two chai breaks over the course of the day (drinking tea + socializing are very important to the Tanzanian culture). I come home around 5pm to help make dinner, which can sometimes be up to a 4 hour process, eat dinner around 9pm study for a few hours and then to bed around 11pm. I hate to think of the houseboy and girl's schedules, spending hours in a smoke-filled shack. I have to remember those are their lives,and that they do get free room and board for it though, which, they may not have otherwise. It's just strange for me to encounter "servants" for the first time living with a relatively poor family in one of the poorest countries in the world, halfway around the world from one of the richest countries in the world. It seems a bit backwards to me, but it certainly been an eye-opener as well.

Two people have left already. One girl girl was medically evacuated on Sunday, just a few days after we got here, and another left yesterday. They won't tell us anything about the first girl only that she is alright. The second girl just decided that the PC was not for her. So that brings our group to 65.

We start out internship, practicing teaching at local schools next week. I'm both nervous and excited about that. I didn't realize how hard it was to explain clearly what sine and cosine and tangent are and have it be at all applicable to anything these students know. I'll think of something though. I'm teaching at a school really near my house for my internship. Crystal, another PCT, who lives down the street from me is teaching the same subject (O-level math) at the same school, so that will be nice to have someone to share ideas with. Martha, another PCT, who lives with my host mom's sister, down the street, is also teaching math, but in a different school. Both of these girls seem really sweet, and it's been great hanging out with them. There are five or six people that live in my area up a dirt road, away from the center of town, its about an hour's walk from here, which is good because they feed us way too much with no time to exercise. I look forward to my walk every morning and evening.

I am invited to go to two weddings in the next few weeks. I'm really excited about going to some traditional events/ceremonies like this, just to see it. I miss you all........keep those letter coming.

Talk to you later, Jessica