13
November
2008

My Last Week at UL Secondary5

As I sit down to write my final blog entry at UL Secondary as an education volunteer with the United States Peace Corps in Tanzania, I still have tears in my eyes. I have never felt so proud. I am sitting in my school library which, thanks to the donations of many who are hopefully reading this, has a solar power set-up for using a laptop computer. My Form II students are continuing to take their national examinations today. My Form IV students already finished two weeks ago. The remaining Form I and Form III classes are busily preparing for my annual biology examination this Friday. Over the next seven days, I will be packing up my home, giving away many of my household possessions and saying goodbye to my friends and colleagues of the past two years. Foremost in my mind this morning, however, is the news that Barack Obama has been elected President of the United States. I have never felt so proud to be an American.

When I left my country in September 2006, the world seemed a very different place. Disenfranchisement of my fellow Floridians and the murder of my fellow human beings in the name of fear had left me disillusioned and angry. Listening to family, friends and loved ones, with their calculated and strategic language, justify the dropping of bombs on cities, on hospitals, on homes, on people unlucky enough to be born in the wrong part of the world, sapped me of all hope and energy. The only “smart” bomb, after all, is the one with the good sense not to explode. I remember so many people that talked about national security and national interests as if 100,000 dead Iraqi civilians were a reasonable opportunity cost. I felt out of touch with so many of my fellow Americans. Mostly, I felt helpless to do anything that could make a difference.

My reasons for coming to Tanzania were largely selfish, as I confessed to my Peace Corps recruiter in his Washington, D.C. office. I had no delusions that I would save the world. I knew that I would get far more out of the experience than I could possibly give. I would teach math and science, important work to be sure, but I would learn another language, another culture, another corner of our planet that most of my fellow Americans would never get to see, living in the place where humanity itself first emerged during (what must be called tongue-in-cheek) the Cainozoic era. What I never expected to receive, however, was grace.

Before I left the United States, I was consumed by the daily news, with my country’s sins of commission and omission, with events in the world over which I had no power and felt I could not change. In Tanzania, I have been given the grace to simply live in peace, to think only about spending time with my students, my friends, working in my garden, and enjoying life from one sunset to the next. I cannot begin to adequately express my gratitude to my country for supporting me in my Peace Corps service, to the Tanzanian Ministry of Education for its cooperation with Peace Corps/Tanzania, to my community for treating me both as an honored guest and as simply a friend and neighbor, and finally to my family and friends for both material support of my projects and emotional support for my service and life here.

It has been fascinating to observe this election year from the vantage of a rural village in the Tanzanian southern highlands, 80 km. away from paved roads, in a community with minimal infrastructure, health care, access to running water or electricity. During the primary season, crammed in the cab of a Tea truck for the three hour trek to town, I overheard Tanzanians discussing the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary as if I were riding a bus in Baltimore. It is my sincere hope that Americans recognize the extent to which people all over the world have been watching, awaiting, and now celebrating this historic time in our country’s history.

As a teacher at my school reminded me yesterday, however, what politicians say before elections and what they do in office are often incongruous. There are examples all around us to make Tanzanians skeptical about elections. Kenya and Zimbabwe remain fresh in everyone’s minds and I have spoken to Tanzanians who secretly fear for their own upcoming election cycle in 2010. Of course Tanzania is not Kenya and it is nowhere near Zimbabwe. The United States of today is also not the United States of even two years ago. And yet, I remain cautious in my optimism. Undoubtedly there will be times of disappointment in the Obama administration, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Palestine, in the health care system, in foreign aid, and in financial regulatory agencies, to name, I am sure, but a few. Today, however, I cannot care about these things. Today, I cannot wait to be disappointed in Obama. To alter my Dad’s phraseology concerning golf and work, a bad day with Obama is better than a good day with Bush.

At present, my future plans are still only short-term. I will finish my Peace Corps service on November 20. I will fly back to the states in December and hopefully return to Tanzania in another work capacity. In the meantime I hope to reconnect with family, friends, and colleagues, in other words, all of you. For keeping up with this website, for sending me emails, letters and packages for the past two years, I thank you. Once I return to the United States and have regular computer/internet time, I will update and revise this website for whatever function it will serve in the next stage of my life and career. Thanks again to Brian Hart for designing and maintaining this page. While I do plan on writing more over the next several weeks, this seems to be as good a time as any to say again: Asanteni, kwa herini, na tutaonana siku nyingine. Thank you, all the best, and we will see each other again someday.

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13
November
2008

Salad Days at UL Secondary1

“Saving the world one garden at a time,” is how Peace Corps Tanzania’s permaculture guru Peter Jenson describes his environmental mission. For a busy education volunteer teaching 450 students during 28 periods per week, such a mantra can be comforting. Only one garden and I can help save the world?! After all, as a teacher, I can hardly spend all day farming, or even spend more than 10-15 minutes in the garden on most days. Between cooking, cleaning, dishes, laundry, exercise, teaching, reading, grading papers and whatever else passes for free time, the day often flies by with many of my morning’s aspirations neglected. Most evenings I end up rebuking myself for all those things left undone. I meant to go visit my friend in the village, practice yoga, play soccer, clean out the storage room, or cook something other than rice and beans. All that being said, spending time in the garden, playing in the dirt, has been one of the most relaxing and rewarding pasttimes I have taken up this past year.

My school’s garden project would never have gotten off the ground in the first place if not for the expertise and assistance of my former site mate, environmental volunteer Jason Maglaughlin, whose own 32 garden bed, model permaculture site inspired me every time I visited him. Together we planned a collaborative venture with a select group of students, many of them orphans, to teach permaculture, bio-intensive farming and composting, and to prepare a garden at the school to supplement the students’ regular nutritional intake. Although Jason had to leave Tanzania before the actual planting, his protege and good friend in the village came and helped with the teaching and the seed-bed preparation.

To emphasize why nutrition alone is a worthy venture here, let me remind you what my students are fed at school. The daily menu begins with uji (corn flour mixed to a watery consistency with sugar) for breakfast, ugali (corn flour mixed to a thick pasty consistency) with beans for lunch, and ugali with beans again for dinner. Sick students and those who pay extra will additionally get one serving of greens (overcooked with oil and salt). This is the regular menu, seven days of the week. On holidays, they may be served rice instead of ugali. For fruits and vegetables, the students are left to their own devices. Fortunately, fruit trees are quite common in the surrounding area. Nevertheless, most students do not usually get an appropriately balanced diet.

Quite selfishly, I too had grown weary of my carb-heavy diet and thought about the garden fresh salads I ate every time I visited Jason. Thus was the Lupembe Orphan’s Garden project born. After consulting with the students about a proper location for the garden, we eventually chose a site adjacent to my own backyard. This allowed us to dig a trench from the roofline to bring rainwater into the garden plot. We also dug a trench from a spot on the connecting footpath that regularly flooded. The key to any good garden, after all, is water.

Since we started this project in the dry season right before the students left for their winter (June-July) break, I often had to haul at least two buckets of water from the river each day, just to keep the seedlings from drying out, not to mention the water I still needed for washing, cooking, cleaning, and drinking. Needless to say, my neck muscles got a good workout and I’m pretty good at balancing a bucket on my head now, though I still need to use a hand for balance. It never ceases to amaze me how gracefully and seemingly effortlessly Tanzanian women balance unwieldy loads on their heads as they climb steep hills, curtsey and chat.

After about seven weeks, the results of all this hard work started to pay off. From late July until mid-September, I was harvesting about two buckets worth of various salad greens every week. I would make two large salads for the group once a week and have a small salad myself every day. Even though uncooked vegetables are anathema to Tanzanians on the first pass, I soon had students begging for salad and for seeds to plant in their gardens at home. As I write this, there are still greens to be harvested, though much less. All the broccoli, arugala and romaine has already gone to seed. However, the tomatoes are only now just ready to harvest and I have already begun planting for the next volunteer, who is due to take over my site at the end of this month.

A good friend of mine who runs a rose farm in Njombe once asked me how I could be motivated to plant seeds that I would not get to harvest. It seems to me that this is actually quite a good metaphor for the work of the education project with Peace Corps Tanzania: “Planting seeds that others will reap.” During training, we were warned against developing an “Ediface Complex” during our service, feeling as though we needed to build some structure to feel as though we had accomplished something. The work of a teacher may only be realized long after the fact. Hopefully the results will be more important and longer-lasting than so many other structures, built with good intentions, yet unused and long forgotten, strewn across this continent. In my final days here at site, I am continuing to spend time with those students who have meant so much to me over the last two years. I am also still playing in the dirt, planting seeds.

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