Blogs from Morogoro, East, Tanzania, Africa - page 2

Dear VIPs (Very Interested...and Important People) We just got back from a 5 day workshop in Morogoro on Community Theatre sponsored by Peace Corps. It has proven to be a successful and effective way to deal with the HIV/AIDS problem and gives us the tools for behavior change that is so necessary. Tanzanians have such a rich culture steept in oral tradition, movement, and music that it is a natural, culturally acceptable way of bringing a message to the people of the community. It's participatory and gets the audience to think, feel, and react to real situations which need behavior change: women's empowerment, HIV/AIDS stigmatazation, sexual activities. Community Theatre is brought to the people. It can happen at a school, church, or meeting site with trained actors (that would be Dave, Wendy, and counterparts Kim and ... read more

The second week of the training got more tedious and our group fragmented more and more. We all just wanted to get to our destination, know where we would be living, what our placements would be like and so on… The food was getting more unbearable too, well it remained the same twice a day, every day. So with the combination of stodgy high carb food and getting on each others nerves, we went out for dinner in town with our small group of young vols a few more times to keep our sanity! Naomi, the Kenyan girl, who was going to share the flat with, moved into the flat this week, so I was keen to hear from her, what it was like and how the first few days at work had been (The Kenyans ... read more

Yesterday we learned some more vocabulary for the kitchen by studying recipes for typical Tanzanian dishes. It felt a bit like watching a cookery show with our teachers lined up in front holding ingredients up and naming them in Swahili… Today we ventured to another convent a little bit further outside Morogoro to actually do some Swahili cooking. The walk there was exciting enough passing through a brick making factory - house high piles of red bricks, that were covered in soil and then lit up in the middle to burn them. The cooking was then took place outside - Tanzanians seem to cook mainly outside, with pots on charcoal fires and all preparation happening outdoors as well. The ingredients are pure and untreated, so the rice for example is being cleaned of little stones etc ... read more

Not having had a chance to visit this new customs agent and not having them recommended properly either (after all Bhupesh, my shipping agent said, he hadn’t dealt with them either), I felt a little tense. But it was kind of promising that Roselyn from Malai took the initiative and called me in response to my email on Monday. We agreed I fax her all documents and then she’ll get back to me with. So I walked into town to find an internet café with fax service to send her my pile of papers. Today she called me again and said everything looked fine, but she needs the originals of the MOT certificate and some other papers to be able to start the process with the authorities. Now, sending documents by Tanzanian mail isn’t recommendable and ... read more

After having divided ourselves in groups of 4 or 5 the previous evening, we were to start our first day of Swahili lessons. Somehow I felt transported back in time to my school days. The youngest ones of us, that was Kevin, Sandra, Sara, Mathew (the 12 year old son of a volunteer couple) and myself formed the group ‘Ndizi chisi’. We had to give ourselves the name of a fruit in Swahili, so we went for ‘Crazy bananas’. Learning a language in 2 weeks seems a quite daunting mission in any case, so the set-up of small groups and 6 hours of lessons a day makes it feel at least a little more viable. The first 2 hours were devoted to greetings - a big difference between Swahili in Kenya and Tazania: While Kenyans like ... read more