In Which I Try to Explain What I am Actually Doing Here

This is difficult, since I am not entirely certain myself.  I am working as an ICT (Information and Communication Technology) at a teacher's training college, which doesn't mean what you may think it means.  The education system in Tanzania is as follows:

• Primary school: standards 1-7, mandatory for all children, but not really enforced.  Age of pupils: pretty youngish.  Medium of instruction: Kiswahili.  Teacher qualifications: have successfully completed primary school.

• Secondary school O level: forms 1-4.  I think students have to pass some test to get in.   Age of pupils: less youngish but typically adolescents.  Medium of instruction: English.  Teacher qualifications: have completed teacher training college.

• Secondary school A level: forms 5-6.  Students must definitely pass some tests in O level to get in.  Age of pupils: older adolescents-20 somethings.   Medium of instruction: English.  Teacher qualifications: have completed teacher training college.

• Teacher Training College: 2 years.  Students must have completed A level, but typically did not score well enough to enter university.  Age of pupils: wildly varies.  Medium of instruction: English.  Teacher qualifications: I think hold University degree?  I could be making that up.  

• University: I know nothing about this, but children have to complete A level and pass some tests to get in.  

So I am at a teacher college and I have some periods that I am supposed to be teaching but I have been told feel free to take some time to not teach them for the first week or 3 or more, and here's a list of stuff we would like you to fix.  I'm not wild about the teaching, since from what I understand, I actually have to teach the official government ICT syllabus, and after doing some internship teaching at a local secondary school, I think what I really need to be teaching is how to maintain a computer lab.  Tanzania's current problem as I see it, is that it keeps having money thrown at it but doesn't really have the personnel or education to do something with the money when caught.  I was interning at a computer lab that would have been fairly nice if anyone had done anything to keep the computers from breaking, or actually used the lab to teach computers, but there weren't really any teachers there who knew anything, and secondary schools have high teacher turnover.

Alternatively, I could spend a lot of time fixing computer stuff here and at other schools.  This actually seems fairly attractive since it would also mean I could probably travel around the country on Peace Corps money fixing people's stuff.  The problem being I don't see that as being a terribly sustainable project unless I can find/train a Tanzanian to be me once I leave.

In the meantime, I am just attempting to put together a livable house that has a bare minimum of stuff.  Today I managed to drink real coffee for the third time in country* following a trip to the expensive wazungu supermarket in town, since according to a 19-year-old friend of mine here, only lazy men without jobs drink coffee.  This isn't strictly true, but coffee usually only shows up here in the form of nasty instant stuff and if I hadn't brought a french press from the states, I would be struggling with the problem of where to find a coffee maker.   There is always the cheap unroasted beans one can buy in the marketplace, but I left my grinder in US.  Also, I'm not sure I have the dedication necessary to roast my own beans.

Tomorrow I will configure a router and solve other first world problems, as well as attend a staff meeting conducted in Kiswahili that I don't understand, but there will be chai.  

*1st time: swankiest hotel in town.  They had a leather couch.  They brought me coffee in a French Press.  I thought I'd died and gone to heaven.  2nd time: dinner party with Europeans.  They also had ice cream.  I would have thought I'd died and gone to heaven, but I was slightly intimidated by the perfectly balanced table and dressing for dinner and multiplicity of forks, heretofore only encountered in Georgette Heyer mystery novels.

In Which I am So Confused by the Absence of Vitriolic Frustration in my life that I Try to Manufacture Some in my Quest for Butterflies.

Training is over! This horrible thing of coddlesome time-wasting is over and I am in the process of writing a formal and well-formatted letter to the director about all the things that need to be different. But that isn't really happening fast or much because I have more breathtakingly interesting things to do with my time. Nest, for example. Being as I am more selfish than Virginia Woolf, I need an entire house of my own before I become self-actualized. Actually, all I really need is a large open space in which to dance without being watched or having my music criticized and a kitchen. I need many things for my kitchen, and they are accumulating slowly because I have to buy things as time permits and in amounts of weight I am willing to carry a long distance up a hill.

Also, I have a new job that I think I will love once I get over the initial awkward phase. I am working at a teacher's college and I have three servers! Three! The fact that I think one has a dead motherboard is entirely beside the point. I have three servers! Downstairs there is an actual real library with both children's books in Kiswahili and novels by Sir Walter Scott that look fair to swashing my buckles! And I have three servers! Before I came two weren't working and I fixed one* so I am useful! And also, I have a dress with butterflies. The two are unconnected. I had purchased fabric with butterflies on it and taken it to my fundi right before leaving for swearing in, tried to retrieve it after returning, had to have it altered because my fundi overestimates my skinniness, and then kept trying to retrieve it at times when the fundi had stepped out for chai or something. While waiting for her return the other day I tried to feel the great frustration I would normally expect to feel, but really, I don't have a tight schedule as yet, I don't have any curfew due to homestay family, I don't have silly training activites, and I do need groceries. I can chill out in the market, greet people, text my fundi in Kiswahili asking when she will return, and buy tomatoes while I wait. I now have my dress. It is pretty and it has butterflies, and I wore it while trying to figure out how to configure a Cisco 870 router for the college. I have no idea how to do this, but I have the ability and free time to look up stuff on the web, which seems to make me the expert in the absence if anyone who knows where this router came from or where documentation for it might be found.

In today's agenda, I have a cold, and it is Eid, so I am taking a sick to stay in bed communing with my laptop and all the anime saved to my hard drive.

*By turning it on. Either it didn't actually have a problem or I haz teh Holy Hands of Dijkstra. 

In Which I Realize that Significant Bandwidth is Necessary for Identity Theft

I just became a victim of theft.  Nothing terribly serious, and actually I got my wallet back sans 15,000 =/, so that is all right best beloved, but it was a creepy experience in which I learned many valuable lessons.  One being that graphical user interfaces on the web are not designed for developing countries.   I know this because in the creepy panic of post-theft, my initial instinct was to cancel all of my credit cards.  This means that I have to visit bank websites from Tanzania, which takes bloody forever and a day due to graphical security measures.  By forever and a day, I mean Chase's website would sometimes hit a logoff timout before it finished loading.  The good news about this is that it would seem to indicate that online identity theft is a problem only of high bandwidth.  The bad news is that I have low bandwidth.   I began cursing ING for their nice little graphical pin which, in retrospect, is a fairly reasonable response to keyloggers.   It does, however, mean that online banking is not really a viable option for developing countries, which is a problem in and of itself.

I also learned that thieves are extremely quiet and that the Peace Corps Safety and Security people are surprisingly sympathetic and helpful even to the trainee who routinely brings a book to all training sessions or falls asleep.  Hamna shida darlings, lesson learned on carelessness, and it only cost me about $10 and some peace of mind. 

In Which I Wax Nostalgic about Fire Safety Regulations

I am currently in training, and it is quite frustrating for many reasons ranging from the typical bureaucratic tripe to the going home to a host family who is frustrated by my inability to communicate without significant lag time between thought process and sentence construction.  In the meantime, I am convinced that I am going to die due to lax safety practices.  Last night my hostmama refilled the oil in my kerosene lantern--while the lantern was lit.  This morning, as I do three times a week, I went to my computer lab, in which power cables are daisy-chained across the floor and plugged into power strips that sometimes make sizzling sounds.  Children mop this floor.  With water, which they slop up against the outlets.  The lab itself is protected by a giant steel door held on to hinges with itty bitty rusting off spot-welds.  If I survive the impending electrical fire, I will be crushed by the falling door on the way to safety. 

 

Further bulletins as time and apathy allow. 

In Which I am Proud to be Peace Corps

At an airport in Newark, a young man came unto me, and lo! He was clad in skintight kneelength jeanshorts, a sleeveless green shirt with horizontal wipestripes, and a straw hat, and this man said unto me, "are you going to Amsterdam?" To this I replied proudly, "no, we are Peace Corps, and we are going on to Tanzania."

Another of my fellow volunteers, a man who is a returned Peace Corps volunteer going back for a second run, came up to me and said, "I heard you tell that man we were Peace Corps, and how proud you sounded! It is something to be proud of, we waited so long and worried so much about this, and now we are Peace Corps!"

Indeed and forsooth. We are Peace Corps. We had a day of lectures about the proud tradition of the Peace Corps, in the Nice Hotel without free internet or breakfast (rich people must enjoy unnecessarily paying for things) and the incorrectly labeled shower water temperatures, but it is not the lectures about Peace Corps that make me proud, it is being able to tell poorly dressed young men that I am Peace Corps. It is knowing an older and already got the t-shirt and going back for a second time volunteer who is still excited and happy that the younger voluneers will proudly claim membership in this community that makes me proud.

It is not Getting Acquainted activites that form Cameraderie with my fellow volunteers (two of whom are RPCVs), it is being roused out of bed for 8am yellow fever shots and then having to wait for an hour for the clinic to actually open. It is the sitting around in the Newark airport for four hours sneakily sneaking a bottle of whiskey, playing cards, and playing the ukelele (well, one of us) in front of disapproving gate agents who are going to an afterlife of rice cakes and prunes. It is the 3 hour sushi dinner courtesy of government money in which we had Scintillating Conversation while waiting for food from a restaurant not staffed for a party of 21.

Do I wish to be bosom friends with all 38 of my fellow group of volunteers? Of course not, some of them are so very very young just out of college sorts of volunteers. Sweet, but young. Says the 25-year-old. Could I wish there were more ICT volunteers with me and that I was not the only woman of the three of us? Yes, but this is a known and familiar problem.

I have come from long lectures and Group Activites, there has been Waiting and Lines and a shot, a bus ride, and an incipient 2 day plane ride for the which I am sitting, thank Bernoulli, in the exit row of a plane, that being the only place other than business class with seats designed for adult humans. Yet I am not lethargically travel-depressed, but excited. There is a full moon out the window, shining behind cirrus clouds to show us our way.

In clouds above clouds,

Lit by Chinese lantern moons,

paths to distant worlds.