This workshop business is exhausting. The moment we get back from dinner I lie down and go to sleep, sometimes unintentionally. Last night Sophie and I were lying in our beds and heard a tap dripping really loudly and rather than walk the 6 feet to the bathroom to investigate we decided to shirk our environmental responsibility and just pass out.
The electricity has been really unreliable for the past two days, and without the white noise of our fan I was woken up fairly early by the call to prayer from the mosque in town. It's funny how you become accustomed to things - the calls to prayer are really, really loud, but I don't notice them in town anymore. What I will never fail to notice are the persistent street vendors. At this rate I will no longer travel without a bottle of hair dye and a wedding ring - blonde hair attracts way too much attention, and I am sick and tired of being told how many goats I am worth. I think that many of them can't actually tell the wazungu apart. To them we ARE like bananas and DO look the same (read back to last year's entries for that reference). The teacher with no money story works on some of them, but for the most part I end up striding down the street with at least one follower unfolding banana leaf paintings telling me about "very good price".
In addition to the mobile economy, the streets are filled with kids. Most of them are wearing school uniforms, which is promising, but there are just a disproportionate number of children in this town. In the day they are friendly and we pick up some of the boys in our taxi on the way to the Centre as they walk home from school. But night time is sad, with the street kids out in throngs. I frequently do double takes to check that they aren't "one of mine". There are mainly boys who live on the streets. Girls are more valuable in the home because they can do housework and look after children, so extended families are more likely to keep them. This doesn't mean that they are leading significantly safer lives, it means that vulnerable girls are hidden, and abuse is less easily spotted. To put it bluntly, it is easier to see when a child on the street is being prostituted than when a child in a home is being sexually abused. Or so we have been told. It is a great comfort to know that our boys are safe each night, each with at least half a bed and a stomach full of rice and beans.
Speaking of their safety, the Centre has two new guard dogs (most places here have guard dogs and night guards and a variation of barbed wire or electric fencing). The dogs are named Spider...and Kyla. I'm not kidding. They named one of their cows Kyla last year, but that only lasted about a day and was done more as a joke than anything else - they don't actually name their cows. This dog has been named Kyla since they got it, which was soon after I left. It even answers to the name (well...as much as Tanzanian dogs answer to names). I haven't asked whether it is a girl dog - I didn't want to detract from the honour they have bestowed upon me. Spiderman is one of their favourite "people". Even Frankie can say "Spiderman" without a lisp, and they all pretend to shoot web out of their wrists. And they chose to name one dog after Spiderman, and one dog after me. Even better, both the dogs look robust and healthy, not like Chai who was their dog last year. I'd rather not know what happened to Chai, but in my heart I hope that he/she has moved on to dog heaven.
More interesting animal news: when we arrived today one of the cows was being led out of the Centre by a rope, and looked really reluctant to go. My vegetarian self took a deep breath, made peace with the fact that the cow had had a fairly happy life by cow standards, and was ready to move on to the slaughter house down the road. Then the boys told us amidst fits of laughter that it was a GIRL cow...and it was being taken to see a BOY cow...so it would "get a baby cow". "Get a baby" is one of my favourite Tanzanian terms. You don't have a baby, become pregnant, or give birth, the whole process is neatly tied up in one term: to get a baby. Juma (my taxi driving friend) is very close with Jill's family, and so I asked him if he had seen Acacia (Jill's new baby). His response was "Aiya, they get a baby!". Perfect. Anyway, with any luck the cow will "get a baby" and there will be another mtoto ngombe for Frankie to become fascinated with. I must say, the whole thing seemed a bit off putting. For some reason I thought that there was some sort of spring time bovine mating ritual that went on rather than this business of dragging the cow down the road to the local bull. Clearly I am not cut out for farm life.
Two days ago we gave the boys disposable cameras. They were SO excited. Many of the boys kept their cameras in the plastic wrapping inside the box, and would unwrap it each time they wanted to take a picture. Some of them finished all 27 pictures the day we gave them the pictures, but most of the younger ones are carefully saving their pictures, running up and asking "Miss Kyla, how many left?" and then jumping around saying "21! 21!". Actually, that is mainly Kelvin, the other boys don't jump around with quite as much zeal. They have each explained to me very carefully that they need the battery from the camera, and the bulb from the flash after we have handed in the cameras for the pictures to be "washed" (developed). This is only after we had explained fifty times that in fact we DID know that you could take film out of a camera and develop it, and then put a new roll of film into the camera, but these cameras were not of that variety. The idea of anything being disposable is foreign to them because every last part of every thing is used. For example, when you buy packaged meat, it comes in three parts: the meat (what most people would buy in North America), chopped up organs, and pieces of fat. Nothing is wasted. The dish clothes at the Centre all have neck holes because they all used to be tshirts, and tshirts are only retired to be dish clothes once they have been really, really well worn. The idea of using anything once and then throwing it away, especially when it has valuable parts, seems ludicrous. The only exception to this rule is the disposal of plastic water bottles. The tap water is not safe to drink so the use of bottled water (mainly by tourists) generates so much waste, and there is no recycling program. Environmental consciousness seems to be becoming more prominent, for example Micah is studying how to protect the environment at school, but his ideas of keeping the environment clean include mopping. The fact that pounds of plastic are burned at the side of the road hasn't raised any eyebrows...yet. Then again, with the number of street kids and orphans around, there do seem to be more pressing problems.
Yesterday we worked on "Autobiography" worksheets with the boys. Basically it was a sheet with 8 basic questions that they could fill in, then decorate with stickers. I was given a book of autobiographies that were written by a grade 4/5 class in Burnaby to take to the boys. They really enjoyed reading them, although they have no clue what Webkinz or computer games are (peanut butter, soccer, and basketball were things they could relate to better). The sheets that we did were intended to be a reply to the Canadian children, and the boys really liked that idea. I was surprised to see that most of them could speak three languages: English, Swahili, and Chagga or another tribal dialect, most of which I was not familiar. They really are smart boys. The last question was "I have ______ eyes and ______ hair", but the responses they gave were not what we expected. The idea was that they would write "I have brown eyes and black hair", but most of them wrote "I have two eyes and black hair" or "I have two eyes and many hair". I began asking what colour their eyes were and they just looked at me and said "brown and black" as though I were really thick. So I asked them what colour my eyes were and they looked at me and said "not brown and black". Ah well, you learn something every day - clearly eye colour is not a major feature in their lives.
Sophie and her dad have gone on a hike today, so I'm going to head to town and prepare some games for this afternoon. Later this week I am going to try and make playdough with the boys, but I have a suspicion that corn starch does not exist in this town, and the recipe said that it is best to make it 2 cups at a time to prevent it being lumpy, and that each child needs 2 cups. I would prefer not to cook playdough over an outdoor cooking fire for 5 hours making 2 cups of playdough 20 times, so I will have to figure out a system of sharing or guage whether they will be ok with lumpy playdough. I don't think they will mind too much. Food colouring is another scarce commodity, so the playdough will be the same colour as ugali, a local staple that looks like extremely thick cream of wheat - Frankie is probably going to eat it. He wouldn't be the first child to consume playdough.
Thanks for reading!
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