Insight on my new site

I feel like I ended my last post with some level of anxiety and negativity. With good reason. It is a tumultuous time of new and frightening experiences that are testing me everyday. You just need to take the challenges one by one and solve each problem as it comes.

That being said, I will say that I am excited for my site. It seems to be in a beautiful region with tons of really nice people and a whole new environment to explore. It took me over 18 hours of travel over 2 days to get to my site. Our first bus took us on a 14 hour trek from the Tanga region to the Singida region. In that long ride, we stopped for the bathroom (chimba dawa) two times. The first time was on the side of the road an hour and a half in, and a second time almost 10 hours into the drive at a rest stop. The drive itself was really pretty, and by the hour it seemed we found all new terrain. Beautiful biomes, I have yet to explore.

When first arriving to my stop, I was honestly super nervous. I was immediately swarmed by host country nationals as I got off the bus. “Mzungu!” “Mzungu, hapa” “Mzungu, I have taxi” “njoo, njoo Mzungu.” I grabbed my luggage and I was whisked out of the madness by two PCVs who came to the station to pick me up. Thank goodness for those lovely people, it was so overwhelming, and at that second, that was just what I needed.

We got chai at a local hang-out spot, and we met up with six new faces of PCVs in my region there on vacation, and happy to meet me. I was regaled of the previous nights events from a number of my new friends filled with drinking, dancing, and falling into ditches. It sounds like they frequent the bars a lot here, which isn’t a problem, I just definitely feel like a bit of an outsider. Everyone seems really nice and welcoming, which is pleasant. One girl, was so kind she even got me to my site without being ripped off by drivers!

The next thing I know I am meeting my mkuu or headmaster, and learning about the school and seeing my house for the first time. Wow. What a house. I have three, big rooms, and two rooms for storage I have electricity and two ceiling fans, plus I have a courtyard where I am going to try to plant a garden. And a bathroom with room for a “shower.” No running water though. Let me know if in a few weeks you want a house tour once I am back at my site for good and I have it a little more set up! No pictures today, sorry!

I was at my site, in all, a little over four days. During that time I met more people than names I can feasibly remember in that short a time span. I met teachers, I met students, I met town folk, I met Peace Corps Volunteers. It was a little bit overwhelming at times. One person I want to highlight is Mama Mganga who has more patience that I have ever seen anyone have for a complete stranger who can’t feed herself and doesn’t know anything that you’re saying. She sat with me, taught me how to cook things my host mama hasn’t yet, and talked to me and corrected me when I forgot a noun class or mis-conjugated a verb.

I was compared a lot to the previous volunteers in my site while I was there by all of these new faces. Apparently there were problems integrating that these people had. I want to say I won’t have problems integrating, but likely I will face the same problems those volunteers did. I really don’t want to have these stigmas put onto me. According to the locals I am very different from the last volunteer in some ways, and I found this out through these teachers bashing them when being compared to me, but now I feel like I have to work to overcome these expectations from the last few volunteers over and over again.

One really nice thing that came out of this adventure was that I learned my swahili was much farther along than I thought it was. After receiving a novice level evaluation on my language proficiency interview, I felt pretty discouraged that I wasn’t going to be able to learn the language, but everyone I talked to was shocked that this was only my second month learning Kiswahili, and I got several compliments on my accent and my language skills. I think that they were mostly happy that I was trying to learn the language, but I was able to manage my site visit relatively unencumbered by my lack of Swahili skills!

Over the last week I learned a lot about my community. I learned that they are Sukuma people, meaning they speak Sukuma, and have traditions related to their people. From what I have seen so far, it seems to be related to respect, and the proper ways to respect people. Who to greet, how to greet them, there was some curtsying involved. They all seemed to be nice and welcoming, and they tried their best to make me feel at home in my new home.

I learned about places that I can go to buy food, the town center, where the big markets are. I really was inundated with a lot of new things, and I was happy to head out a little sooner than a whole week. It was an overwhelming week, and getting to spend time in town with new PCV friends, and also spending a day in Singida with other new people helped me feel much more comfortable with this whole new process. I also definitely found a group to play dungeons and dragons, so that was a fun bonus.

In the end, yes it was a whole lot of travel, and a whole lot of the unknown, but pole pole I am filling in these questions that I have about the next two years. These questions will never go away, but I am certain that even with these questions I can craft an experience that is perfect for me.