[note] Nov.14.2009

1.
The first friend I made in Zanzibar was rather unusual, but he still remains to be one of my best friends. The friendship is unusual because he’s probably well over my grandparents’ age (though I don’t know how old he is exactly and I doubt he himself does.) and I don’t even know his name. I just call him “Mzee”, a respectable address for an old person in Kiswahili. I’ve often wondered what his real name is. I know it wouldn’t hurt to ask, but whenever I see and talk to him, I just feel Mzee best describes him and that calling him otherwise somehow may weaken our friendship.
He sells coffee every morning and evening on my street, it’s the Arabic coffee that you drink with a tiny cup while it’s really hot and with bites of sugar-coated snack called Kashota to ease the bitterness in your mouth. The coffee is really strong and I often find it difficult to fall a sleep at night if I have a couple of cups in the evening. So I limit myself to go have a coffee only on the weekends, but whenever I pass by him, I stop and we chat for a while. We talk about our family, Japan, his life or other trivial things.
Oftentimes being one of a very few foreigners in the neighborhood who speaks fair amount of Kiswahili and stops at the coffee stand to actively engage in conversations means you’d be bombarded with lots of questions about you and your country. While I enjoy these friendly interrogations, it gets irritating when the person you’re talking to persistently asks you questions like “how much money are you making?” or “you guys eat snakes and frogs, don’t you?” Those aren’t really questions out of curiosity but they ask them anyways to confirm what I’m like based on their assumption which probably classify me as someone like an extremely rich guy with huge appetite for unappealing creatures.
But the Mzee never does that. He often scolds those who come up to me with those questions.
Whenever he gets into the question mood, he’s very unassuming, open-minded and curious about my family and eagerly listens to my answers. He never loses his patience trying to understand my Kiswahili and he always takes time to make sure that I understand what he says. In fact my improvement in the language is largely attributed to having those daily conversations with him.
When my parents send me a package, they put lots of Japanese snacks and I always share them with him and others at the coffee stand. He loves them, especially packs of peanuts and tiny rice crackers. I’ve told my parents about him, and I’ve already asked them to bring lots of snacks when they come to visit me in December. (Yes, my family’s coming over for the holidays!) The Mzee is also excited that he could meet my family.
A couple of weeks ago, I stopped seeing him at the usual spot in the mornings and evenings. The word on the street was that he was hospitalized for some kind of gastrointestinal disease. I couldn’t figure out what exactly was wrong with him, but I figured being hospitalized is a serious trouble. I didn’t see him for a few weeks and was starting to worry, but this week, as I was walking down the street, I heard a familiar yell. I turned my head to the side of the road and there he was, sitting on a long bench in a shade with couple of other neighbors. I immediately run and greeted him. Apparently he recovered and came home. He looked quite healthy, in fact looked five years younger than the last time I saw him. He said he needed to take a break for a little while from coffee vending, but would be back in business within a few weeks. Excellent news. I’m looking forward to his return now. He’ll still be able to meet my family and we’ll all be able to sip the cups of coffee and share the snack in December.

2.
I recently started learning Arabic. It’s not intensive at all. I don’t expect to be able to understand the language any time soon, but I’m enjoying it.
I really should be focusing more on Kiswahili but the fact is, at this point I could get by with what I know. I can’t use it fully in classrooms, or understand what the radio says except for hourly Kiswahili news segments on BBC which is followed by English news, but I can convey my thoughts on fairly complex topics like religion and understand what others are saying to me.
The opportunity to learn the new language came to me abruptly. One morning during assembly, I was sitting beside an Arabic/Religious studies teacher. I made a comment on the Arabic exam paper he was holding, saying that the letters looked so much more complicated than the Chinese characters. Then he was quick to explain to me that they really weren’t. He started writing the Arabic alphabets on my note and that marked the beginning. Since then, he teaches me a few vocabularies and grammar rules every morning and though very slowly, I’m making a progress.
The teacher’s name is Jabir. He’s one of my best teacher friends, but it wasn’t that way in the beginning. My first encounter with Jabir was in March this year. I remember when we first talked, I was rather annoyed by his persistent touting of his religion. Being a religious studies teacher, he is a very devoted Muslim and every time he saw me, he was keen to explain how Muslims already knew, thousands of years ago, many scientific facts such as the earth orbiting the sun, and that teaching science was technically teaching quaran. He was also eager to make detailed analysis of contents of the student preaching during Thursdays and Fridays and repeatedly describe them to me. He was doing those things out of favor partially as a religious studies teacher to introduce me to the religion. Although I didn’t mind learning about it, I often couldn’t catch up with his enthusiasm.
But as I got to know him, I realized he was a very tolerant and progressive individual. Religion is a sensitive topic. People often look at me with disbelief and hint of superiority over me when I tell them that I don’t have any religion. Whether it’s Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism (though the latter two are much less prominent in the country) or any other religion in the world, pertaining to a particular faith comes as a second nature to many Tanzanians. Having no religion is often considered to be unenlightened. So what happens in general is that a person with no faith would be considered very odd and if your faith is different from a person you’re talking to, he/she would have my-religion-is-much-better-than-yours attitude. It’s like a competition as my friend once put it. So I often tend to avoid talking to people about religion.
Jabir, though very devoted Muslim, is different. As much as expressing his ideas on the religion, he is eager to know and explore different faiths when I explain to him what I know about the Buddhist philosophy. (To most of the people I’ve talked to, the concept of being dead as a human and revived to lead the next life as another form of organism is completely absurd and unacceptable.) Not only about religion, we’d discuss politics, our laments on corporal punishment (as far as I know, he’s the only one teacher at school who criticizes the practice.) and time-consuming and unyielding staff meetings. In fact, he’s the only one person I feel comfortable talking honestly about many sensitive issues which I refrain from disclosing to the other teachers or friends.
I’ve been impressed by his optimism and energy. He’s the only one teacher who would get up during the morning student preaching time to encourage the students to read more books (though being old, our school library has quite a collection of books thanks to donations from a high school in the UK) and learn time management, while the other teachers would spend their speech on reprimanding the students for their lack of effort to learn and always being late to school. I can understand how they just want to put all the blame on the students in a rather dismal situation like this, but he constantly reminds me what we ought to do.
This week he said he wanted to learn Japanese, so I started teaching basic Japanese alphabets which I admit are quite difficult to remember if you aren’t used to the strokes and patterns. But he is making a progress. One time when he told other teachers in staff room that he started learning Japanese, they replied that the language is extremely difficult and impossible to learn. Then he said, very calmly but in assuring manner, “nothing is difficult or impossible if you put thought into it.” In a place where there are many difficulties and challenges and where trying hard may amount to nothing in the end, it’s hard to maintain your optimism and energy. Then there he is. I am very lucky and happy to have him as a friend.

[photos] The Ramadhan Trip, Aug. 21- Sept. 21

I'm long overdue on the Ramadhan trip photos. So here they are. Some of the most memorable part of my trip.

1. Southeastern Tanzania

The Southeast is often reffered as "the real Tanzania" or "the real Africa". Whatever these titles mean, the region along the Mozambican boarder seems to be left out from the development hustles elsewhere.
This was where I headed for the first part of the trip. The roads were often in rough condition. Water and electricity was a rare luxury in most of the towns I stayed. But soon I began to forget the discomforts as I began discovering this unspoiled part of the country, in countless small town stopovers and arid, flat land over rocky hills.


2. Ruaha National Park

A much less-crowded, cheaper less well-known option with equally astonishing wildlife as in the famous Serengeti NP or Ngorongoro Crater up North.


3. TAZARA Railway to Zambia

Connects Dar es Salaam and Kapiri Mposhi, a Zambian city only few hours away from Lusaka the capital in 2 nights and 3 days. The ride was surprisingly more comfortable than I'd expected.


4. Zambia

Now, I've officially been to two countries in the continent!
Nshima is a Zambian staple equivalent of ugali. It's made of maize flower and has a texture similar to that of mushed potatoes. How to eat: pick a small chunk, roll it by your hand, dip it into the stew and take a bite.
I also visited a school where one of my volunteer friends worked.


5. The Victoria Falls



Of course, I couldn't leave Zambia before looking at the falls.
I stepped into Zimbabwe for few minutes on the bridge. Techinically, I've now been to three countries in Africa.


6. Journey on the Bus

Bus ride is often long and uncomfortable.
I get up at 5:30, get my stuff together, rush out of a guest housem hurry toward a bus station while it's still dark, get on the bus, cram myself on a window seat.
The bus leaves before dawn, jam packed with people and other livestocks (chickens are very common).
I'm sleepy, tired and hungry, but then the sun comes up. I open the window and look out. My face is dried, covered with sweat and red dust. I'm worn out but the moment is just perfect.
This was in fact the most memorable moment in the trip.

[note]Oct. 04, 2009

Two weeks have passed since I came back to Zanzibar from the Ramadhan break. A week after the school started. Conveniently last week also marked one year anniversary since I first arrived in this country. Because the Ramadhan starts in mid August next year, and I have to report to Dar for orientations by mid September, I’ve got about 10 months left at the site.

1. The Two Years

Like most of my friends, I too had thought that the two years might have been a little too long, but now I feel it’s a fair amount of time if I really want to get down to earth to have an experience of working with the Tanzanians, see what works and what doesn’t.

If it was for three months, I would have finished happy, being blinded with initial excitement of coming to the new country and just being able to speak in Kiswahili. If it was for six months, when the initial excitement worn off and I was starting to glimpse negative aspects of the place, I would have felt like just giving it all up, never want to come back to the place again and forget about my involvement with the “developing” areas. If the program was just for a year, I would have felt lack of accomplishment on the airplane back home, because now I’ve got a good idea of how things work here.

I spent most of my first year trying to grasp the situation my school and the site was in (looking back previous blog entries, I wrote that I was going to do it in the first three months, but clearly a couple of months wasn’t enough.), and identifying what works and what doesn’t in classrooms. For example, with stable supply of electricity and plenty of places offering photocopy services, making handouts and giving them out to the students is quite easy at my site. And it’s been working quite well.

Now that I’m not a stranger to the people at my school any more, that I have a better idea about how the school runs and that its annual schedule has become less unpredictable, the second year is the time to see what I can do without the disadvantages of the first year.

2. Degree Obsession

I learned that lots of things change at the end of Ramadhan. Form4 students don’t come to school any more and get ready for the big national exams. This is also the time when many teachers leave the school to go back to university to pursue higher degrees. From what I know, at least five teachers, three science teachers and two art teachers are leaving.

Now I know why some of my colleagues had always lamented about lack of science teachers in the Tanzanian (Though they say Zanzibar, I maintain that the archipelago still belongs to the larger country.) schools when it seemed to me that the school had no problem operating with sufficient number of teachers in any subjects, even without me. Turn over of the teachers here is very high. If they see the opportunity to go get higher degrees (in no matter what subject), most of them will abandon their teaching for it because that piece of paper certifying they have a higher degree is a single important thing to have when getting a job or raise. Apparently, someone having a higher degree with no experience in the job is considered more favorable than someone with 10 years of experience in the field. This race to get as many and advanced degrees as possible is backed by the government: government regulation allows teachers to return to university with scholarship and other assistance after they have completed certain years of teaching.

So, high turn over of the teachers, on top of relative scarcity of science teachers, inadequately supplied schools and syllabi that require us to cover unreasonably large amount of highly advanced topics such as electromagnetism and radioactivity. The result? Unstable education especially in the science subjects, which leads to poor understanding of the subjects among the students thus wide-spread lack of motivation to learn, which in turn leads to few number of students pursuing science subjects and becoming science teachers.

And this is where the volunteers come in.

[short announcement]

I'm writing this from the city of Songea on the Southwestern corner of the country.
I've been on the road for about a week after the school has been closed for the Ramadhan, mostly traveling around the Southeastern mainland and will continue traveling around the Southern highlands. I won't be regularly updating the blog, but will post photos and record of my travel once I'm back in Zanzibar.

[photos] Field Trip to Chumbe Island Pt.2

After coming back from snorkeling, we had a short lecture by Mr. Khamis (a marine biologist and eco-tourism coordinator on the island) about the reefs and its role in the ecosystem.


Jo was our snorkeling instructor. The guys liked to take pictures with pretty much anyone they met during the trip.


Today's lunch: mchicha (spinach, the green stuff), mchuzi (stew) and maharagwe (beans) on top of wali (rice), ndizi (banana) for dessert and fanta for drink. Pretty much a standard deal.




We eat by our right hand. Food just tastes a lot better this way.


After lunch, we went on walking around mangrove forest on the island to learn more about the island's ecosystem.


Sitting on the edge of the cliff to discuss what they observed.


He sure likes to get his picture taken with the ladies. Neema was our mangrove forest tour guide.


At the end of the day, the students are taking simple quiz to review what they've seen and learned.


Group photo at the end.

[photos] Field Trip to Chumbe Island Pt. 1

No matter where you are, you need to get out of the classroom once in a while and so do the Form 3 students at our school. As you can imagine, in a resource poor setting it is extremely rare for students to go out on field trips. (I'm not sure if such concept is recognized as an effective teaching strategy elsewhere.)
Luckily we are in Zanzibar and there are projects to introduce the students to local ecosystem, notably its marine life. Chumbe Island project is one of them. The island is one of the off shore islands near Zanzibar and coral reefs surrounding it has been protected and conserved for more than 10 years. Like most of the off shore islands, it is privatized and advertised as a luxury resort to which only a small minority of the locals can afford to go.
But what sets Chumbe apart from the other resorts is that they have set up a project to raise awareness of the locals about marine environment and related environmental issues. While they offer one of the largest and well-protected coral reefs and isolated resort, they restrict number of visitors on the island at any time to 14 or so and rely entirely on rain fall and solar power as sources of water and electricity. They also have highly efficient compost toilets (I used it and it didn't stink at all!) that do not use water. Part of the project consists of inviting students to participate in one-day exploration of the reef and mangrove forest on the island with lectures given by professional marine biologist.
Although raising awareness of the environmental issues may take a long time (Global warming and other environmental issues are commonly perceived as "rich countries' problem."), the project opens up a door to the locals, especially to the students, to explore the marine environment and adds a little field experience to their learning which is almost exclusively done using books in the classroom.

So one day in August, I was invited to accompany a group of students to head out!



Getting on board at the Zanzibar shore. The students were still wearing their uniforms at this point, so I wasn't sure how they would swim or if they would be comfortable at all with those clothes.


Although we can't see it on the picture, the boat ride was quite rough due to strong wind and big waves. It took about 40 minutes to the island.


On Chumbe now. Now they look more like they are ready to swim. The girls needed to entirely cover up and the guys also wore t-shirts on top for the religious reason.


It comes as a surprise considering the location, but for most of the students, this was their first time to swim. So they are getting a quick lecture on how to put on and use the snorkeling gears.


Again, they practiced basic snorkeling skills such as breezing through the snorkel pipe in shallow water before going out to the reefs.


Now they are ready!


Some excited faces.


He was very excited (and shivering a little) after swimming and spotting corals and fish.
Too bad my camera wasn't water proof to take photos in the water.


Going back to the shore. By this time they were quite comfortable with water and swimming.

To be continued on Pt. 2....

[photos] August 1, 2009

I realized that I haven't put up much pictures of my site, so this week, I decided to take my camera out and snap some photos.


My street in the morning.



The tarmac road to town where I get on a daladala (the mini-van on the photo).


After 15 to 20 minutes, my daladala arrives at the terminal adjacent to the town's Darajani market. This is where I get off.


Walking in Stonetown to the school.


Another photo of the town's narrow, maze-like street.


View of Stonetown from the third (top) floor of my school.



Busy street of Darajani market.


main building of the Darajani market.



He's a child of one of the teachers at school. I was sitting around the school's entrance when he noticed my camera and started posing, waiting to get his picture taken. I'll develop this photo and give it to his father before I leave.

[note] July 29, 2009

Well, I haven't updated in a while so here's what I've been up to.

1. For the past month or so, I started staying at school for the afternoon session as well to hold tutorial and lab sessions.
although learning environment in Zanzibar is better off than some of the other parts of Tanzania, thanks to donation of brand new science text books for every students, lab equipments are still scarce especially in physics. Lack of equipments makes it hard enough for the students to conduct experiments, but makes it even harder for me to teach them the concept of experiment when the students understanding of doing experiments is to play with the apparatuses without thinking about its purpose and data analysis merely getting "correct numbers" written in the books and drawing a graph.
In my opinion, the point of doing these experiments to test your hypothesis or in the case of high school, observing what's written in the books actually happens. But this is a hard concept to convey even in a resource rich setting. At least though, when we were kids, we got to play with the voltmeters, test tubes and other gadgets at school, so we sort of had an idea.
My students however need to wait until they get to Form 4 (grade 10) to touch these things, because the only time they do their experiments is to practice for the "practical" section of the science national exam. (Which in my opinion, is totally missing a point because the exams are graded solely based on getting the "right" experimental values, disregarding inescapable errors.)
So you could imagine that the labs can be quite chaotic with careless handling of the equipments and waves of students with worrisome faces coming at me to make sure that they have the "correct" data. But feedback from the students so far has been a very positive one. I regret I didn't start this lab sessions earlier but I plan to continue with it until the end of my service, and hopefully this no-experiment-until-form-4 trend can change slightly.

2. This week, my Form 4 students are writing exams which means I have a lot of spare time to walk around the town to talk to and get to know some of the acquaintances on the street, like a Masai guy from Arusha selling traditional accessories and a time keeper at an internet cafe I always go to.

3. Something I was told the other day from one of the regulars at the coffee vendor near my place: "Wewe ni Mswahili tayari." (You've already become a Swahili person.)
I guess I could take it as a great compliment.

[note] July 03, 2009

I’d like to be a little philosophical on this one.

Following entries have been assembled from my journals.

1. “Mzungu!” “Cheena!”

Every country or language has an offensive term or two for people from elsewhere. “Gaijin” in Japanese, for instance, literally means a person from outside or a foreigner. While the meaning itself isn’t particularly offensive it could be when used in certain contexts. English language has numerous terms for any group of people that are known to be derogatory.

Kiswahili is not an exception. “Mzungu” (a white person) is a long-standing word for a cancasian person, but could also be used for any foreigners who have lighter skin than the locals. More common way to address someone of Asian decent is to call out “China” (but it is pronounced as “Cheena” so I’m going to use this spelling instead of how it would be written in order to distinguish between the way it is used here and the country China.)

First of all, “Cheena”, as you can imagine, doesn’t imply the country China, a person from the country, or whose background is Chinese. Due probably to the fact that it is a short and easy word (only two syllables) to pronounce than names of the most of the other Asian countries, it is used to refer to an Asian-looking person whether he/she is from one of the Asian countries or elsewhere in the world. While I am fully aware of the fact that Asian people cannot be distinguished by appearance and that there is nothing wrong about assuming where a person is from, I find it utterly ignorant and offensive in some context for an Asian looking person to be called out as “Cheena” by strangers on the streets. (And yes, it’s always the strangers who do this.)

It could be quite aggravating especially when a bunch of grown ups yell out “Cheena!” (with a clear intention to make fun of you) followed by “hee hoo haa!” or “ching chong chang!”. (Mind you, the Chinese language, be it Mandarin or Cantonese never really sounds like these.) So I often get irritated when strangers on the streets address me as “Cheena” because doing so would merely expose one’s ignorance to the world.

But then again, where we come from, we are taught, to some extent, to be aware of cultural and ethnic diversity in the world since our childhood. We are much more informed and exposed to the outside world through traveling, books, newspapers, programs on Discovery channel and particularly in case of North America or Europe, interactions with people with many different backgrounds. It is simply not the case here. So when I feel anger towards the ignorance of people, it comes from the fact that I’m taking those forms of exposure in my life as granted. Those, I’ve realized, are a luxury which relatively a few people in the world can afford.

2. Connections

Recently I started feeling that I’m being let live by people around me.

I have never strongly felt this way or really thought about it back in Japan or North America: over there, I felt I had, to a large extent, a control of my life. How I lived my life was entirely up to what I do each day: how I talk to people, how I work or study, how I behave myself in front of strangers. But here I feel that how your day goes mostly depends on behaviors of people around you.

For example, I could start off my day bad (I could even hate this place for a moment) when someone yells “Cheena” at me on the way to school, but then I mingle with the teachers and the students at school, have prolonged greetings with crews at my favorite local diner during lunch and on the way home I see the usual faces of the neighbors saying what’s up and smiling at me. We talk, joke around a bit and by the time I start walking again toward my place, my day seems to be much better. At the end of the day, I’m happy to have yet another good day.

Whether it’s a good one or a bad one, I’d never felt the kind of connection with everyone around me before I came here. There were and still are, off course, irreplaceable connections between me and my family and my friends, but not with everyone I met in one day. People, including myself just seemed lonely at times back home. But here whether you like it or not, you will constantly be reminded of the unbreakable connections with everyone around you and that you will never be alone.

[photos] Tanga/Lushoto Trip May 30 - Jun. 4 2009 Pt.2

The view suddenly opened up after an hour and half of walking in the forest.

This is the edge of the Usambara mountains. You can see how it dramatically rises up from the Maasai plain.

Here I am, at the Irente view point! (or more like edge of the cliff.) I was scared to go near the edge for a while after arriving. There was no handle bars or any other measures to prevent you from falling down.

The view was just spectacular though!

I finally got a courage to crawl over to the edge and look down below. There was nothing there to catch you for at least 500m below.

Again, they asked me to take a photo of them, so I did.

The end.

[photos] Tanga/Lushoto Trip May 30 - Jun. 4 2009 Pt.1

The school was off again for a week, so I headed out to the mainland again, this time to go visit a volunteer friend of mine in the city of Tanga on the northeast coast and the town of Lushoto perched in the middle of Usambara mountains for its cool mountain climate and short hiking.


This photo was taken at Tanga train station. Tanga is one of the few cities in Tanzania with irregular fleet train service. Too bad they don't take passengers any more.

Having a drink on a lawn at Mkonge Hotel, the nicest hotel in the city.

Another photo of the lawn, facing the Indian ocean.

After a day and half in Tanga, I left for Lushoto, which was four-hour daladala ride away from the city.

Overview of the leafy town of Lushoto. Cool climate due to its location on the altitude of 1200m in the Usambara mountains makes it a good base for hiking.

The morning after arriving in Lushoto, I decided to go hike up to the Irente viewpoint where you could havev a splendid view the Maasai plain down below.

Leaving the town in the morning.

Lushoto and villeges in the surrounding area are connected by well-worn foot paths like this one on the photo.

It was about 7:30 in the morning and the kids were going to school.
I usually don't take photos of people unless they ask me to because I think it's rude of me to suddenly whip out my camera and go crazy. But this time, they asked me to so I didn't hesitate.

Just as I walked on the path, I realized how much I miss the mountains while living in flat Zanzibar. The ocean is right there of course, but I could go for days without seeing it when I shuttle back and forth between my place and work.

Because the Lushoto area has a high population density, much of the hills are cultivated as seen on the photo.

To be continued on Part 2...