I can totally reference the Lion King in my daily activities here in Tanzania...

Started 9. June

Karibu!  Well, it’s been a few days since we arrived in Tanzania and started staying at the Smbazi center.  Our travels/flights were long (from the time of departure to the time that we got here, it was something like 30 hours – we’re just getting a head start to that patience thing that we need so much of) but when we arrived in our final destination of Dar es Salaam, it was an astonishingly short amount of time until we got our bag and arrived at Smbazi.  All the volunteers arrived safely and no bags or passports were lost, so I’d definitely say that’s a win.

We stayed in Dar for a few days, but were not allowed to leave the center.  Every morning we had breakfast from 7 – 7:45 then began our trainings for the day.  We would break for chai (I FREAKIN LOVE BEING IN A TEA CULTURE) midmorning, lunch midday, and then end around 5pm.  Otherwise we would have training session after session, meeting loads of Peace Corps (PC) staff members.

The staff here is fantastic.  There are only tree Americans on staff, while the rest are Tanzanians running the various programs in the country.  Many of them have been working with PC for years, and have seen many different PC classes come through.  They obviously love their country and want the best for it.  In the case of my training class, they are training us to help provide teachers for the next generation.  It’s kind of nice to see that Peace Corps doesn’t run everything but has people from the host country take control of

Written 20. June 

Trainings

So I’m still in the training process, but here’s a general idea of what kinds of trainings we have:

-       health (includes far too many things, including common illnesses, dental info, STDs and HIV awareness, how to have clean drinking water, how to use the Choos [squat toilets], gender specific issues, and numerous shots).  The health sessions are pretty good, but I always am very paranoid afterward that I’m going to be sick all the freakin time

-       safety (how to not be an easy target, how to not get into a bad situation, how to diffuse tension when in a bad situation, cultural aspects)

-       language (most obvious training that we all need) is at least a few days a week, depending on when other trainings are scheduled.  We have been split into groups of 4 – 6

-       time with the homestay family (I’ll explain more about this later)

subject specific trainings as well as general “how to teach/discipline/manage classes” trainings (all 47 of us are going to be teaching, but we have physics, chemistry, math, biology and English)

Training fits a ton of information into a very small time frame.  We have about 10 weeks in which we do all those trainings and only have 1 day off a week.  That one day off isn’t very relaxing either, because it is spent with the homestay family.  This is a good thing, because my homestay family rocks, but it means that your brain is constantly having to think in Kiswahili, which can be pretty exhausting.  This past Sunday I was so exhausted (we went to church, I studied for about 3 hours, and then I fumbled through communicating with my family, all of which was completely in Kiswahili) that I forgot the number 8 in Kiswahili.  I went to bed early that night!

I’m thoroughly enjoying things here, but will have an occasional day where I wonder who in their right mind goes through living immersed in a different culture.  Then I think, who would choose to do this twice?  Oh yeah….me….