My Homestay Family Here in Tanzania

My homestay family

While I’m in training, I am living with a homestay family.  Peace Corps places every PCT with a family so as to help with learning Kiswahili, Tanzanian culture, and to establish some ties with Tanzanians.  African families are a bit different than a lot of American ones.  Family may be distantly related (and I mean distant) but they are still family and are treated as such.  Family sizes differ, of course, but I’ll just be telling you about my own experiences.

            So in my family I have Mama Judith, who is the matriarch of the family.  She is a jovial, wonderful woman who works at the Teacher’s College of Morogoro.  She laughs a lot and is quite eager to teach and explain Kiswahili to me.  She doesn’t use very much English with me, and it’s helping a great deal.  I’m still a bumbling idiot who speaks very broken Kiswahili, but she laughs at me whether I get things right or wrong. 

            I also have Baba (father), who is a lecturer at a university in Dar es Salaam (3 hours away from where we live in Morogoro).  He stays in Dar during the week and returns on the weekends.  He laughs a great deal and watches soccer with me.  We both were cheering for Germany during the EuroCup and he seemed very entertained by my reactions to the games (keep in mind I was doing my best to not swear, but sports-induced swearing is quite common with me).  I don’t honestly see Baba very often, but he’s another one of the amazing people I’ve met here.

            That brings me to my dadas.  “Dada” means “sister” in Kiswahili, and is a title unto itself.  For example, everyone calls me Dada Amy.  That’s my first title!!  Wahoo!

            So Mama and Baba have only one daughter.  Her name is Gladness (we tend to call her “Glady” for short) and she is five.  She’s my buddy.  Dada Glady and I play lots of games.  I’ve taught her some clapping games and she’s taught me the only card game she knows.  She’s fascinated by my hair and will often touch it after I shower.  We get along swimmingly, though she definitely would rather hang out with me than allow me to do my homework for my language classes….

**In Kiswahili, parents are often known by the names of their eldest children.  In the case of my homestay parents, they are known as Mama Glady and Baba Glady.  It’s definitely different!  So if I were to be in the States, people would literally call my parents Mama Amy and Baba Amy, rather than Dori and Tom.  It seems like everyone has multiple names that I’m supposed to remember, so it’s been kind of hard thus far!**

Dada Fikiri is the elder sister of Mama Glady.  She is in her forties and is the best charades player I have ever seen.  She will take me by the hand to lead me to things so that I can understand what she is talking about.  We laugh a great deal, as she is an incredibly goofy person who will make fun of herself.  She gets very excited when I understand things or am able to form simple sentences, so it’s an incredible ego boost that is often needed! 

Dada Fikiri has a son, Joshua, who is thirteen and goes to boarding school during the week.  The school is about an hour away from where we live, so he comes home on the weekends.  He taught me soccer vocabulary.  It’s awesome.  I brought a soccer ball as a present for the family and he was particularly excited when I gave it to them.

So in Tanzania it is not unusual to have house girls or boys, who are basically servants but are treated like a part of the family.  It’s interesting.  It took me a few weeks to figure out exactly what all the relations were in my family, as everyone is called “dada.”  But we have two house girls.  Dada Dina and Dada Ava.  Both are in their late teens, but Dada Dina doesn’t go to school anymore.  They are sweet girls who are super patient with my minimal language skills.  Dada Ava stopped me from showering with chai by accident my first morning here.  They laugh at me a great deal, but in case you didn’t realize from my descriptions, Tanzanians laugh all the time. 

My family found me particularly hilarious when setting the timer and running across to get in the picture on time.

At the top: me, Mama, Baba
Bottom from left: Dada Glady, Dada Dina and then Dada Ava
Unfortunately Dada Fikiri and Kaka Joshua were both gone.

They put up with my silliness with the language, bless their hearts! 

So that is my homestay family.  They are pretty awesome, and I’m learning a ridiculous amount from them.  It’s weird to relearn things that I thought I knew how to do, but it’s a reminder that I’m in a developing country.  My family is pretty well off by Tanzanian standards, and we have electricity, but no running water.  So I’ve gotten incredibly good at bucket showers.  We cook outside on charcoal burners, sort through our rice to pick out the little pebbles that tend to sneak in and clean off any of the husks (I’m not sure if that’s the right word for them) that are still there.  My family will often ask me if we have or do certain things in Colorado, and it’s interesting trying to explain that we do have bananas but that they are shipped in.  My standard answer is that we have stuff but it comes from Brazil for the sole reason that “Brazil” is one of the countries that I can say correctly in Kiswahili.  It’s a bit different at my family’s house, because we have a banana tree in the backyard.  And yes, the bananas here are ridiculously delicious.