Sweet Home Tanzania

After being in Tabora for a week, I realised that when I go home to Australia, I will have no job and no place to live. This realisation helps to alleviate sadness that might come with any bouts of homesickness and I came up with the brilliant idea that I would from now on think of my house in Tabora as home. I now live in Tanzania. Even though I have no actual address (the street I live on doesn’t have a name and you will find rocks from Saturn before houses with street numbers here), it helps to think of this dusty compound as home, even if just for the time being. I think of this as my life and it helps me to feel more settled.

Interestingly, I haven’t had a hard time getting used to anything that people talk about where visiting or living in a third-world country is concerned. I don’t mind the dust or the flies, I can take the heat, the food is fine and the people are lovely. Of course, I do realise that I have only eaten Adela’s tomato eggs, chapattis and cabbage salad once; have only been to the Tabora Hotel for dinner, pool and dancing three times; have only been living in a dustbowl for a week, and that my fairly benign feelings on these things may well change once the monotony of a set range of food and entertainment options sets in. The other girls spend much of their time now discussing the food they miss, having lost a total of 30 pounds between the three of them in the six weeks they’ve been here, and roll their eyes at the Tabora band which plays exactly the same music in exactly same order every Friday, Saturday and Sunday night. To me it’s at once a novelty and something that felt very normal very quickly. Even though the week has gone by fast, I feel like I have been here a long time, in a familiar kind of way. Of course, it is still next to impossible to find my way around, but I’m still being patient.

Living with a group of strangers who have six weeks’ head start on me has its challenges but nothing at all to complain about. In fact in many ways, it’s amazing that five girls from five different countries can be bunged together in a house in the middle of nowhere and still want to talk to each other at the end of the day, and still have the ability to make each other laugh. The only thing I ever feel frustrated about where the living situation is concerned is how the others have absolutely no issue with leaving their dirty dishes for Adela to clean twice a day. To me, Adela is our cook and apparently our “housegirl” (if you can call a grown woman that) and we should be cleaning our own bloody dishes like the adults we are. However, the girls tell me I’ll “get used to it”. Problem is, I’m not sure I want to get used to it. I have never been able to handle the idea of one group of people waiting on another. Adela isn’t our maid, and even if she was I wouldn’t expect her to do my dishes (OMIans note: 10,000kms away and I am still harping on about the goddamn dishes!). But it’s the norm in this part of the world: Doctor and Mama have people who work for them in their house, and the pilots we hang out with on the weekends have a personal driver who sleeps in a tent in the front yard (to me, this latter example is very, very hard to accept). The average employed Taboran earns 2,000 Tz shillings (about $2) a day and supports a whole family on that wage. Most seem to be working in unskilled/domestic labour and it’s the way things are and have always been. But I don’t like it. And so I do my own dishes.

I’m getting much more used to the children and they are slowly beginning to take form in my head as individuals, rather than as a big anonymous mass of giggles and tickles. I know about 15 by name now (20 to go) and I had this pretty uplifting moment on Friday (see pictures) when I sat down with my back to the wall of HAPO and five or six kids came and sat down next to and on top of me. We were a big mass of arms and hands and kumbatia (hugs) and I felt they had sought me out specifically rather than simply responding shyly to my overtures. It was a great feeling, even though these kids are hungry for love and don’t need much encouragement at all to skip up to you, take you by the hand and say “Mwalimu! Wewe, mimi” (you and me, teacher) while dragging you off to a corner to practice saying vowel sounds. They are all fiercely protective of the volunteers so any non-HAPO kid who tries to talk to us is reprimanded while we are removed (most bossily) from the scene.

The little boy with me is Selemani, probably one of my favourites so far. Sele is deaf and his mother remarried a man who didn’t want him and used to lock him in a room, so his mother left him with his bibi (grandmother). He walks an hour and a half to HAPO every morning on his own. Apparently he can be seen taking little rests, lying by the side of the road.

Of course, Sele has had no therapy for his hearing impairment and was mute until he came to HAPO. Now he is starting to speak and it will be a long road, but I often see him chattering away in his own truncated form of Swahili which you can understand once you get to know him. He also is incredibly, incredibly bright and has developed an intricate system of sign language which he incorporates with these amazing facial expressions that well and truly get his point across, even though no one has ever tried to teach him to communicate. For instance, when he’s telling you a story, he drags his finger across his throat and then shakes it once at the ground, which means “I swear to god it’s true”. The frustrating thing is that he seems to be able to hear extremely loud sounds and may just need a hearing aid to turn his life around… but he is waiting for a place at the deaf school, where (apparently) he will be thoroughly tested. But while he’s waiting, he’s losing precious schooling time and it’s a shame because he is so bright. And very loving too. There’s something about having a once-mute, tiny, abandoned, Tanzanian 8-year old look at you and say “I love you”.