First Week

I'm going to start this entry by apologizing for the downward spiral my vocabulary has slipped into after spending only a week living and working with tots. Tickling, scolding, baby-talking, and reading Corduroy books all day has its effect.

Life in the Rift Valley Children's Village is good; way better than we were anticipating. The accommodations are pretty posh in comparison to our expectations: comfy beds, yummy home-cooked meals, mamas to clean up after you... it's all pretty pampering, really. The first couple of days were chill. The new batch of volunteers  were able to just hang out with the kids, get to know them, acquaint ourselves with the bubble that is the Children's Village, etc. Even those days were exhausting, and they seemed so long ago. I honestly experience some difficulty believing we have only been here for a week.

The staff, the mamas, and the student teachers have been very friendly and clearly did their best to welcome us. We were fortunate to have the beginning of our stint here overlap with the visits of veteran volunteers Fred and June, and a board member named Demeter, with whom I instantly clicked. Some of the other volunteers seemed like instant friends. Maggie, for example, is a chill, friendly girl I feel privileged to have a bond with. She sort of adopted me when it turned out that the mentors assigned to me weren't exactly, let's say, interested in dealing with other volunteers. Bob, rafting guide from out West, was Bill's roommate for the first week and proved to be an excellent source of volunteering wisdom (and home-brewing information).

There are a couple of folks here with whom I'd rather not have to cross paths. I shan't name names, but I've overheard some appalling conversations about some of the children here: complaints of a toddler's lack of masculinity; references to one of the children being too ugly; even many and varied disparaging remarks about a one of the mamas' mourning the loss of a close relative. It was pretty infuriating to listen to. I could only hope a couple of people are digging themselves into a karma crash. Apparently, I'm not alone in my criticisms of these volunteers. They're very unpleasant people--one more than the other, I have to admit--at an advanced level of bitch. When I ponder the connection between such cultural insensitivity and lack of compassion with long-term volunteering in Tanzania, I don't come up with a positive conclusion. I guess one should always expect to run into disappointing personality types, even in a place like this.

Some of the unpleasantries (is that a word?) aren't interpersonal. These updates might not be posted as regularly as we would have hoped because the internet charges here are apparently incredibly expensive. Bill and I (and three of the other volunteers we were talking to) had no idea that the charge for internet use was $15 per week we're here. Bill was told it would be $15 for both of us per week, which is still a big sum of money for us, but I didn't hear anything about that, and, another volunteer here has to pay $10 per week even though she doesn't even have a computer with her, so I'm pretty worried about the whole thing. We were all talking about it in the volunteer house, the other new volunteers and I. We are on the same page about this. One of the staff members here told me I could maybe talk to the Volunteer Coordinator about only using the internet on certain weeks to reduce our costs. I hope that's a possibility, because a mandatory cost should be a part of the sum we paid upfront, not something we have to come up with after spending five or six months without pay, especially for a service that isn't always available to us. As some of you know, Bill and I literally emptied out our savings to do this. Seeing having to come up with hundreds of dollars at the end of this on the horizon has already put a bad taste in my mouth.

But there's lots of time to spend thinking about all of these things, and the days are tiring enough, so the focus, at least for right now, won't be on the unpleasantries, but rather on the friendships I've made and the children I've already grown close to. I look forward to the experiences I have ahead of me.