A Typical Day at TCDC

You’ve been waiting for an update. On tenterhooks, I know. I meant to give you my week one update around, you know, week one, but week two is just about to end and here I am, my post barely in progress. My apologies. By way of explanation, I will describe a typical day at TCDC:

6:45 AM – Wake up. Brush teeth the old backpacking way, squirting water from your water bottle through your toothbrush. We’ve got a lovely bathroom all to ourselves, with running water, a flush toilet, and a real shower that even has a heater (will increase the water from ambient temperature by ten or fifteen degrees). Luxury. That does not mean that the water is potable, however. The other students mock us because we have it so good—no outhouses and bucket showers for us. Heheh. *feels privileged but also embarrassed*

7:00 AM – Breakfast. This is a small meal, of white bread with your choice of peanut butter, honey, butter and jelly. Drinks include coffee, tea, or hot chocolate; milk, water, or juice. (We’re hard on our host family. Lotte is lactose-intolerant and I don’t drink tea or coffee. They were kinda surprised. ^_^) The first few days we were offered corn flakes to assuage our Western palates, but our mediocre enthusiasm and gentle persuasion led Mama Resti to begin serving us bananas and fried egg instead, sometimes with little red sausages on the side. Bananas—there are more kinds of bananas here than I even knew existed: yellow banana, potato banana, plantain, sugar banana, a kind of banana that’s apparently really good to make banana beer—my favorite is the tiny sugar banana, which despite its name, is tasty not because it’s sweet but because it’s also tart. Mm. There’s enough time between breakfast and class that we usually have time to do our homework in the morning.

8:30 AM – Swahili class starts, an easy five-minute walk away. Our class is split up into three parts, each with its own teacher, for maximum personal time. The man I met on the street that first day turns out to be one of them. His name is Kisanji, and everything with him is “bomba bomba.” My teacher is Ritha, who’s much younger and very beautiful; with her everything is always “safi” (clean, fine). She’s an excellent teacher, able to deliver Swahili to us at a lightning pace, but what really entrances me is how gently she explains Tanzanian culture to us. By the end of the first day, she had me hanging on her every word, as much for the delivery as the instruction. What examples can I give of the charming way she speaks? Aah…

It’s the first day, and we’re learning greetings. All eyes are on her; we’re exhausted from our flight the day before but we’re paying pretty good attention. “In Tanzania,” she says, her vowels clean and “r”s either rolled or nonexistent, “greetings are very important. You may spend five minutes greeting each other. How are you? How is your family? What are the news of the day? We do not go on until we are finished greeting. We are very polite.” This phrase, this politeness, comes back up a few more times. There are seven short verbs in Swahili, but only six of them are commonly used. There is kula, to eat, kunywa, to drink; kuja, to come, kwenda, to go; kuwa, to be, kufa, to die. And kunya, to piss. “Say kunywa,” Ritha says. “Kunywa. Do not forget the “w.” If you forget the “w,” it means what you do when you are at the toilet. We do not use that word. We are very polite.”

“What do you say if you have to pee, then?” one of the kids asks.

“We say, ‘go to the bathroom.’ We do not say what we are doing there. It is not my business what you are doing in the bathroom.” There’s a low chuckle from the class.

It’s an inadequate example, but if I write down everything I remember until I get it right, I’ll be here all night. I have a Swahili quiz tomorrow, so I really ought to move on.

10:00 AM – Chai break. We walk over to a pavilion for a half-hour break for masala tea with milk, coffee, or hot chocolate, accompanied by either popcorn or tiny, red, roasted peanuts. Every day, there’s someone who expresses surprise that I don’t drink tea or coffee. And every day, I explain that it’s a part of my religion—a health law, if you will. “Ok,” they say, but they don’t understand. It really sets me apart. Everyone here drinks tea, coffee is one of their biggest crops, no one has heard of Mormonism (the closest Stake Center is in Nairobi, Kenya), and what in the world is unhealthy about a cup of chai in the late morning? The honest answer is: I don’t know. I believe in Mormonism, so what it requires of me, I promise to do. If it weren’t so, that masala chai looks like it’d be pretty tasty…

12:30 PM – Lunch. Most students live off campus in Usa River or Macumira, so they bring their lunches and eat together. Lotte and I walk home and eat a hot meal prepared by Mama Resti. There’s a gas stove in the kitchen, but she says it cooks food too quickly; it tastes better if she uses the charcoal one. The food includes rice with carrots or peas (wali), beans (maharage), with some other starch (white sweet potatoes, potato bananas, normal potatoes, cassava with a coconut sauce to make it sweeter, thin fried bread called chapati, a solid porridge made of corn flour called ugali), a bowl of meat with vegetables (nyama na mboga, which can be beef, chicken, or fish cooked with carrots, peas, or green peppers), a bowl of cooked vegetables (either cabbage with pieces of carrot, or a stew made with okra and bitter tomato; sometime some more carrots or peppers or beans are thrown in), a plate of fresh vegetables (either sliced cucumber and tomato, sliced cucumbers with mayonnaise, cucumber and onion and apple with mayonnaise), and avocados fresh from the tree in their yard (parachichi). Almost always there is also some sort of fruit, either bananas or watermelon (ndizi au tikitimaji). With all these many dishes to eat from, I never go hungry. The food is excellent. I know why they have a chai break, though. With six hours between breakfast and lunch, the blood sugar needs a boost long before lunchtime.

1:30 PM – Technical training. Every day we learn a little about a new piece of hospital equipment and then practice soldering and/or building useful supplies like LED flashlights or variable power supplies (we made one! And it worked! =D) to help us at our hospitals. It’s a little strange to hear the things which will likely go wrong—most of them require little to no engineering background to fix. Being able to solder is a good thing, but the main problems Larry keeps mentioning are problems with mismatched power supplies, user error, loose connections, dirty filters, or leaky tubes. Do they really need us to do these things? Apparently so…hmm. =\

4:30 PM – Chai break. Again. Maybe.

5:30 PM – Class ends. Go to the bar to hang out with the other kids, stay in the classroom to take advantage of the power cords and internet access, or head to the gym or outdoor basketball court for a workout. Or find a last-minute logistical concern that has to be taken care of before dark—deliver your laundry to the workers at TCDC, walk down to Usa River to withdraw money from the ATM, take a dala-dala down to Macumira to get passport photos printed. Homework? What of homework? What I really want to do is write home. When the connection is so slow and the power so sporadic, this takes much more time than you’d think. (Twenty minutes to upload a single blog post because it had one picture in it…)

7:30 PM – Dinner. Same style as lunch, probably different options. This food is so delicious! By the time it’s been six hours between lunch and dinner (apparently they normally eat right before bed, actually—they moved it up for us), you get hungry. Only one complaint: the food is pretty heavy. No non-stick pans on top of the charcoal stove, so everything has a lot of oil in it. It hasn’t made me feel uncomfortable or sick like the greasy cafeteria food did, probably because of the good fiber in the veggies and beans. But with my extremely sporadic exercise regimen and tendency to be sitting indoors all day, in class, I feel like my athleticism is slipping. (Lora says she gains wait every time she comes down here. Great.)

10:30 PM – Bed. Give or take. Some days later, some days earlier. Depends on how tired you are, if you did all your homework, if you actually bear through with your computer, or if you play point-at-the-picture-book-and-try-to-name-the-objects with little Joe, Baba Josef’s grandson (who’s got amazingly good English skills). And now it is actually 10:30. And I need to be in bed.

Meh, this is all pretty rote; probably not that interesting. But time is short, and precious, and my sleep is much to be desired. Good night, and a further post soon (hopefully).

           Before I go—a picture of Lotte eating some samaki (fish) from a restaurant. Doesn’t it look delicious? To eat it, they gave her a spoon. ^_^