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Grandparent alert: this post contains some foul, but necessary language.
It’s 8:30am. I’ve hiked the mile to the road and back, cleaned the entire house, remade the beds, boiled drinking water, refilled the filter, greeted all the neighbors, checked on the strawberry plants, redistributed the compost, and have begun planning my week. My right eyelid has been twitching for 36 hours; an physical manifestation of the emotion stress my body is learning to manage. My hands are just a little bit shaky (probably too much coffee), and my back and neck are reminding me that water is heavy. In comparison to my neighbors, I’ve done nothing productive.
This week, I broke. Not all the way… nah, I’m doin alright. But I wouldn’t be giving you the truth if I didn’t tell you that there are some really rough days. If you had come to my house on Wednesday around 3pm, you would have found me alone on my cement floor, hyperventilating in the fetal position next to a teddy bear in a bucket of boiling water. Please..laugh. It’s okay. Actually, I’m laughing while I write this, but it’s one of those “oh shit, she’s on
the ledge..” sort of laughs. I should start from the beginning:
First of all, I’m really happy here. That’s not a rose-goggles outlook (or whatever pessimists like to say); I just feel right about things in my life. Last week, though, I had a strange pending anxiety as if I had a lot to do and no time. I hadn’t been sleeping well, and even after traveling to Iringa (a quaint mountain town in a neighboring region) for a Tanzanian music festival and some R&R, I just felt off. I woke up the day after returning from Iringa with a row of bites on my stomach in patterns of three. If you’re familiar with Kuungini, you’re already panicking with me. Bedbugs.
I wasn’t certain that the little f*ckers had done it, but considering volunteers’ recent horror stories, the odds weren’t in my favor. Suffice it to say, the Peace Corps will only pay for house-hold fumigation if all other avenues have been exhausted. Some volunteers have gone months being eaten alive before being approved for fumigation. So, that meant boiling. Boiling. EVERYTHING.
Steam-cleaning is inconvenient in America when you wait on
the washing machine to do every single load. In Tanzania, steam-cleaning is all but impossible without running water or proper stoves. I spent the morning carrying buckets of water from the clinic pipe, and tediously boiled kettle after kettle full of water, pouring it into buckets full of clothing, shoes, backpacks, bags, boxing gloves, headbands, pillows, sheets, blankets, towels, and everything else that a bedbug might infiltrate. I took my bed apart, moved it out into the sun to bake with my mattress, benches, and the guest mattress, and burnt my fingers multiple times trying to hang steaming fabric on anything with a surface. I pulled a mat into my living room and camped out on the floor, hoping the rat in the rafters didn’t sh*t on my face in the middle of the night. It took four days.
Since the child-voyers stare through the cracks in my fence all day, I finally put them to work bringing me buckets of water in return for candy from the care-packages from home (shout out, Mom.. they freakin’ loved the tootsie rolls). Unfortunately, the prospect of candy has only exasperated the voying. They realized I was mildly-psychotic when
I started yelling English from inside my house. If I switch to English when I’m telling you to go away, it’s not about you understanding anymore. It’s about me losing my f*cking mind. Sometimes, I just stop what I’m doing and stare directly back at them through the cracks until they can’t handle the weirdness anymore and run away. Usually, I lose.
Anywho.. my house is now sans-bedbugs. If not, those f*ckers are apocalyptic survivors and deserve to outlive me. I finally slept in my bed last night, and enjoyed the company of four other volunteers from villages here in Njombe for a little wine and some crafting. Since I’m the closet volunteer to our banking-town, I can usually bribe people to come and visit me instead of paying for a hotel in town. It helps that I splurge on real coffee and have a guest room. The good news is that my eye didn’t twitch while I was holding the wine bottle! There’s an upside to everything, right?
So, yeah, there were a lot of down-points last week. The anxiety was already heightened and then it seemed like all the little things I
tried to do went wrong. I lost my mind a little bit, pulled it together, and dealt with it. The Basic B*tch inside me wanted to take her last, screaming breath, and so she did.
(Can I get a pumpkin spice latte, please?!)
On the upside of my literal panic attack, I’ve done a lot of cool stuff since I last wrote. There was one day that I walked to the village dukas to buy some fruit and got drawn into a circle of drunk, toothless grannies who force fed me food they had salivated all over. Another day, I sat in on a classroom at the school and watched a seventh grader lead a class of 75 fourth-graders. I’ll be teaching English there this week.
I also hiked to multiple farms and finally made the decision to buy two goats! I’ll be bringing them home after my counter-part and I have finished building their sleeping shelves. Lavender is a one-month-old kid, and Basil, her mama, will be moving in as well. As long a Lavender is nursing, I’ll have goat’s milk, and their manure will make my garden oh-so-green! I
should be able to demonstrate compost-building to the villagers soon.
Additionally, I discovered the ducks I’ve been researching, Khaki Campbells, are available in a neighboring region. They produce around 320 eggs a year on average, and I’m hoping to use them to demonstrate nutritional benefits of protein via small animal husbandry. Holy sh*t, I sound like a farmer. Fake it till you make it?! I plan to bring those little guys home after Early Service Training in July.
My neighbors and government officials have been ridiculously helpful in supporting me when I need something, but I embarrassed myself last week by accidentally walking into a board meeting completely filthy after spending the morning gardening. Regardless, they stopped the entire meeting and answered the question I had come to ask. The younger of the two nurses from the village clinic has requested that I teach her how to exercise, so almost every day at five we “funya mazoezi” together. That means “do exercises.” I’ve performed 17 village farmer interviews to gauge knowledge of sustainable agricultural practices. I was also able to teach my counter-part about various uses for herbs like lavender, basil, dill, and oregano,
which should be sprouting in my courtyard soon!
There are still cultural challenges. It’s difficult to become accustomed to Tanzanian time structures. Someone will tell you that they will absolutely be somewhere at two o’clock, and then arrive at 4:30 with no need for an explanation and no notice. Usually, they are so happy to see you that it’s impossible to be angry once they arrive. Frustrating, nonetheless. My hands and feet are torn apart from the different activity here, and food becomes boring, so it’s hard not to binge when we all get together in town. My books, incense, and episodes of Downton Abbey have kept me sane. Also, the care packages you all have sent me have taught me a new sense of gratitude. I can’t believe how well my family and friends know me, and what to send me to cheer me up. I just love you all, and I cry every time I open something sent from home. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
I need to get up, get moving, and find more nails to build this goat shelter. I miss you all, and I’m sending you my whole
The Jiko Oven
charcoal, and a pot inside a pot-- We're rockstar innovators when it comes to making bread. heart through every sarcastic word.
Peace, love, and bedbugs,
The ever-waning Basic B*tch.
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