Things are coming together

Again, you have to deal with a hodgepodge.

A New Mother Flippin Camera arrived yesterday!! Just in time to take a picture of kids in front of a Rainbow. (To be uploaded later)

So...things are looking up. Having withdrawn from the volunteer culture here seems to have placed the two of us in positions of respect. Tanzanian staffers (as well as other key staffers) treat Maria and I differently. It is probably because we don't treat them as hired help or irrelevant. Plus, we have shown enough effort to speak the language here to actually learn how to say more than the bare minimum. The house mamas are so encouraging when it comes to our fumbling in Swahili (much more proficient stumbling than 2 or 3 weeks ago, though) where we usually wind up having a good laugh when we finally understand what the heck they are driving at. We are greeted by the student teachers with much more affability than we see the other volunteers receive, so the experience that we had imagined while sitting around in America is still feasable, albeit in spite of a couple of awkward meals shared with the volunteers who seem to be here for the "I did charity" badge each day.

We went to Arusha last weekend. We left on Saturday with mama Upenda and wound up staying with an OT professional named !Woman who is a great friend of the director of the Rift Valley orphanage. She is a self-professed nerd (competent in swahili) who gets folks from rural Tanzania the charity medical care that they need. Her job seems to strive to connect the NGO to the needy; chances are that Guatemala/Belize needs something similar. After 6 weeks of only hours off each week, the sleeping the heck in (until noon) was AWESOMEly refreshing. Maria got to see a homeopath, which proved to be a very eye opening experience. The consultation had some very therapeutic elements ("how do you feel about this aspect of your illness?") and although I am sure that Maria will elaborate more on it via some electronic diary, for the first time in her life, her ethnic identity was portrayed as something positive ("universal citizen") rather than something like "Well, I can't tell" or "You could pass for Italian." I think that alone was an important milestone of an encounter, let alone the possibility of figuring this awful arthritis issue out. The trip to Arusha forces us to swim in a sea of Swahili and I can confidently say that we are exactly one click better at speaking in the language. I am not sure how many clicks it takes to be fluent, but I can now speak well enough to enter the awkward phase of conversation where dealing with me is a burden. I can't just smile through it like I used to. Yesssss! Progress.

When we returned, we experienced two (awesome) things. 1.) Last Sunday, a drunk, (let's call him Richard Move), cursed and was generally a Jackass in front of the teachers again, but this time, in front of a person on staff, to whom he challenged their legitamacy in confronting him. Selfishly, this corroborates the opinions cited here and it highlights how inconsiderately dumb he can be. As if his fucking opinion on the situation, through what would have to be magic, is the most correct one. The audacity in challenging the authority of a staffer in front of the people that she manages is astounding. 2.) Further, they pulled our resumes after getting the go ahead to begin developing a "Roots and Shoots" program here and were impressed by what they saw there. We are getting re-assigned to use our strengths. Maria is now a full partner in science club. I am going to spend much more time up at school teaching the hell out of some science. And hopefully the people who are treating this like a vacation where you are babysitting until happy hour will be assigned to the youngest kids who demand attention.

The Roots and Shoots program focuses on empowering youth with the understanding that social injustice and environmental issues are intimately linked. If you look at people on the sociological level through the prism of Maslow's heirarchy of needs you can see that people need to have their basics taken care of before they can start fighting for causes like sustainability, because we, at our core, need to be fundamentally selfish before we can be altruistic. I may be put into a leadership role in this and I am soooo excited about it.

I have some other orphan realizations that will be fun to write up a little later.

Badai

"Seeya"