A Typical Day

A Typical Day as an education Peace Corps Volunteer in Tanzania

Wednesday


5:45 am
I can barely make out the morning call to prayer over the loud speaker from the mosque in town. I'm half awake but since it's still dark I try to go back to sleep.

6:00 am
The loud horns of the buses honk in any type of jingle imaginable as they prepare to leave when the first ray of sunlight shines over the mountain. Buses, at least passenger buses, are not allowed to travel at night so they must use whatever sunlight is available to them to their advantage. It begins to get brighter and I stare at the mosquito net and watch as a mosquito buzzes around trying to find a way in to bite us before the sun rises and it goes into hiding - like a vampire. Since I can't go back to sleep I get myself quietly out of bed, trying not to disturb Russ, my husband, as he is still deep in slumber land. I walk to the toilet in our house and as I turn the corner for the door, a gecko scurries into the crack in our ceiling board and scares me. We do this every morning like a ritual. I guess it's too early for me to remember everyday where he likes to hide. I don't mind him because he eats mosquitoes and other bugs. Before I make my way to the toilet I turn on the light switch. All light switches to bathrooms here are outside of the room because the electricity is not grounded. I enter and find there's electricity now.

6:15 am
As I walk into the living room I hear the chatter of a flock of Superb Starlings outside probably catching up on yesterday's events or arguing about who gets the moth territory this morning. Cows "moo" as they are being milked, of which one liter will be delivered to us later. As it's still a bit dark I turn on the kitchen light, turn off the outside security light, and unbolt the kitchen door to the outside (the key lock is still locked but our house help cannot enter if the bolts are still in place). Since there is electricity I will make breakfast. On days when there is no electricity I don't bother making breakfast as there's not enough time to light the jiko, charcoal stove, and if we did it would be a waste of charcoal just for some porridge. I fill a sufuria, cooking pot, with some water, put it on the right burner of the two burner stove, plug it in, and turn on the power switch next to the plug. The knob for the right burner broke off so it comes on and stays on if the stove is plugged in. I get the package of uji, millet, soya, and groundnut flour mixture, and measure a few wooden spoonfuls into the water. A little sugar is added (otherwise the uji tastes like dirt) and stir it. While the uji heats up I transfer the boiled drinking water from a sufuria from last night into water bottles then fill up the sufuria with filtered water to be boiled after breakfast is ready. The uji eventually comes to a boil and when big bubbles reach the surface they make bursting sounds and look just like the "Fountain Paint Pots" at Yellowstone National Park. I take the uji off the burner and replace it with the filtered water to boil.

7:00 am
As I sit eating uji, which is gray and has the consistency of porridge or cream of wheat, my watch alarm goes off. I'm lucky on the days my watch alarm wakes me up. I go to tell Russ that it's seven o'clock and he mumbles something then turns to continue sleeping facing the opposite direction. I get dressed and hear that the water has come to a boil. I look at my watch and set a mental 5 minute timer for the water. I lay all my things out which I'll need for the day - purse, math books, little pouch of index cards with all of my students' names, calculator, folder, toiler paper (although normally tp is just for my nose, when traveling I always abide by the rule: A PCV is never without TP!), and water bottle. I look at my watch and notice the water has been boiling for seven minutes - but better longer than not. I turn off the stove, unplug it, and move the boiled water on a doily to cool. I check the water level in our homemade bucket filtration system, which uses ceramic filters given to us within the first week of arriving in Tanzania, and it's low. I add more maji baridi, which literally means cold water but here means non-salty water, as opposed to maji chumvi, salty water, because we don't like the taste of salty water. Then I place vegetables on the counter indicating what our house help should cook for lunch today. Since I soaked beans the night before, I put out a few tomatoes, green peppers, and onions to make kachumbali, tomato, pepper, onion salad, along with the beans. I also put out our tupperware of unga wa mahindi, corn flour, for him to make ugali, the staple food of Tanzania which is a hard ball of boiled corn flour. I see Russ up and about just as I'm ready to leave. We say our good mornings then I'm off to the office.

8:00 am
My first class today is at 8:20 am so I go the office a little early. I greet whoever I meet on the path to the school, about a minute's walk from our our, with Habari za asubuhi? - News of the morning? The reply is typically nzuri, good, or salama, peaceful. When I reach the classrooms, however, I am greeted with "Good Mornings." I unlock the math department door and enter. I put some things down and put a few more pieces of chalk into my chalk box and a student asks if he can enter. I allow him to come in and he asks if he can use my Elmer's Glue (from America) to fix his daftari, notebook. I tell him yes and he begins gluing together pages.

8:20 am
The bell (a huge tire rim that is hit with a rock) sounds and a few of my students help carry all my things for me to the classroom. They do this all the time and I don't even ask. When I walk into the classroom, all the students stand up. On of them claps his hands twice then they all say in unison "Good Morning Madame." I say "Good Morning, how are you?" and they reply "Fine." I tell them they can sit down and it becomes noisy for a few seconds as all the chairs move on the concrete floor. Today's lesson is about 3-dimensional polygons and I bring models of prisms, pyramids, cylinders, and cones that I made out of card stock like paper bought at a local stationary store. We go over all the different shapes and I ask them if they could give me "everyday" examples of these shapes. One at a time they raise their hands and I call on them to answer. For cone, they though of carrots and mounds of beans and rice found at the market; for cylinder they thought of cups and pipa, oil drums; and for pyramids they thought of the Great Pyramids of Misri, Egypt. We count together aloud the number of vertices, edges, and faces each shape has and draw and label them on the chalk board. I see through the windows and door outside our second master who is walking around with a stick and gives threatening looks.

9:40 am
The bell rings to mark the end of my (double period of 40 minutes) class. I sign a log book that the class monitor (one student who keeps track of the teachers' activities) hands to me at the end of each class. I notice all teachers taught yesterday but a teacher did not teach the period before me. I write "Polygons" under the topic, my name, then initial. A few students help me carry my things back to the math department. I greet teachers who walk by and my fellow math teachers who are in and out of the department throughout the day. I drop my stuff off then go to the administrative office to see if Russ or I received any letters - no mail for us today.

10:20 am
It's chai, tea, time which is a 40 minute break and I'm off to the mgahawa, tea room where I greet the ladies who work there. I buy "bites," of which my favorites are chapati, fried flat bread, and bagia, ball of fried yellow split pea flour, and tell her it's to go, which means the "bites" will be wrapped in newspaper, often times from South Africa from last year. Total cost: 150 Tanzanian shillings, or 13 cents. I walk back home to find our house help, we call him mzee, old man, sweeping dirt off our porch carried by last nights' wind. I greet him with Shikamoo, which literally means I hold your feet but is a greeting of respect to elders, and mzee replies the only reply, Marahaba. I ask him, literally, how is the "news of the morning/home/family" and he replies that everything is "good" or "peaceful." I eat my "bites" with a banana to follow. "Bites" are usually eaten with highly sweetened tea that will give you a sugar rush like you wouldn't believe. I don't drink tea with my "bites" because I prefer not to get a mad sugar rush and then crash from the tea in the mgahawa and I don't want to take the time to boil water and make tea at home. Mzee asks me how many people will be eating lunch today so he knows how much ugali to make. We often times have guests, sometimes the environmental volunteers from the surrounding villages show up in town or Angus, a VSO who works with Russ at the TTC, will join us for lunch. I tell him it will be just two today - myself and Russ. I ask mzee if he could chota maji, fetch water for us as we're down to two buckets. He, as always, says, hamnashida, no problem. There's plumbing in our house but no running water so all the water we use has to be brought here by some means. Mzee straps three 20-liter buckets to his bike then goes to town to the bomba, water spigot, to fill them up then brings them back. He does this several times a week. We are very cautious how much water we use and sometimes don't take baths or wash clothes just to save some water. I tell mzee I'm going back to work and he wishes me kazi njema, good work, and I wish him the same.

11:00 am
Since I don't teach until 1:00 pm I go to posta, the post office, to greet the ladies who work there and ask if Russ or I received any packages. On my way I pass two primary schools and some students are lurking around outside. They greet me by saying, "Good morning, teacher!" I say "Good morning, how are you?" back to them and they reply "fine, thank you teacher!" Today we got lucky and she pulled out a package from my parents, which means People magazines and flower-scented soap. Yippie! I feel like going home to open the package and spend all day catching up on celebrity gossip that I shouldn't care about but I'm good and just drop off the package at home, open it but leave the magazines on the couch to be read at a more convenient time. I then visit a fellow teacher's house to greet their three year old twin daughters. They greet me and ask where Babu, grandfather, referring to Angus, and Russ are and I tell them they are at work and the girls accept this answer and continue drawing in the dirt with sticks. I then make my way back to the math department to finish up lesson planning. I am visited by a few students who have questions about significant figures and decimal places. They usually have classes during all periods of the day but sometimes the teachers don't come to class to teach and that's when they seek me out for extra math help. Here the classroom belongs to the students and the teachers move around.

1:00 pm
The bell rings and I go to class again. I teach the same lesson to this class as I did to the morning class. This is the second "stream", or class, of Form 1 students, equivalent to 9th graders. Each Form is split into two streams at our school.

2:20 pm
The bell rings to mark the end of my class and the end of the school day. As all the students walk to the cafeteria I walk home to see Russ patiently waiting for me, to eat lunch. Beans, ugaji, and kachumbali - oh yeah! I eat too much ugali forgetting that it expands in my stomach and rest a while reading People, to help in digestion of course. I ask how Russ's day at work was as he tells me the usual - taught a little, electricity was cut for a while, and read stuff on the internet.

3:00 pm
Russ goes to see a friend and practice his Kigogo and I start lesson planning and then read People magazine on our front porch. I hear "Hodi! Hodi!," the Tanzanian way of knocking, and am greeted by a women selling tomatoes and onions carried in a bucket on her head (no hands) and a baby strapped to her back with a kanga, piece of cloth. I buy a few bunches of things and she asks for drinking water, which I give to her.

6:00 pm
I start dinner as it beings to get dark. Tonight it's spaghetti with tomato sauce with fried okra. As I cook dinner I notice the colors of the sky turning pink, purple, and orange. It's a nice sunset tonight and I go to the porch to watch it for a few minutes. That reminds me to turn on the outside security lights. I put some water in a bucket to be heated for bathing (using the best 2,000 Tanzanian shillings we ever spent on an electric heating wand) and head back to the kitchen to finish dinner.

7:00 pm
Russ comes home just as it's getting completely dark and we sit down to dinner. After dinner I usually take a bucket bath while Russ does the dishes. Then he takes a bath and we both hop into the safety of our mosquito net to read as the mosquitoes are in attack mode and are quite annoying.

9:00 pm
We lock and bolt the doors and go to bed.