Cookin' Tanzo Style

So cooking over kerosene stove, while limiting at times, is still enjoyable.  I love cooking so one of the most enjoyable parts of my day is cooking dinner.  So many people at home may be curious about the options available.  We actually have quite a bit: spinach, eggplant, hot peppers, bell pepper, onions, tomatoes, and potatoes.  I only miss a few things like cheap eggs (eggs are expensive for our budget), milk, cheese, and nice ready-to-cook meat.  I am lucky that I have an amazing family though, because I usually have some packages of tuna for some quick protein.  One of my favorite Tanzanian foods is chapati.  Chapatti is the African version of the Indian naan.  You may also say that it is just a thick tortilla.  Well anyways, I thought it might be fun to show here so if you are interested, you can try it out for yourself!

To make chapatti, you need 3 cups of flour (maybe a little extra to flour the rolling surface), oil, salt, and water.

First, in a bowl, combine 3 cups of flour, a pinch of salt, and about a tablespoon of oil.

Next, add enough water so that you are able to form one elastic ball of dough.

Break off pieces of dough, experiment with the size you want.  Roll out the dough, drizzle a little oil on the dough, and then roll the dough back up and set aside.  I am usually able to form between 8 to 10 balls from one batch.

After oiling all of the dough, set aside for 20 minutes to 1 hour.

After setting aside, roll out the chapattis into reasonably thin circles.  Again, the thickness is mainly up to your own preference. 

Heat about a tablespoon, or less, of oil in a pan.  After it is hot, add a chapatti.

When the chapatti is good and bubbly, it is time to flip.

After you cook them all, you can go traditional and enjoy with a hot bowl of beans, or make wraps.    

So this is just a little taste of Tanzania.  Hopefully more to come!  Bon appetite!  Peace out!

As we go on...We Remember...

First of all, I want to add some pictures of Claire's very successful HIV/AIDs Education/Soccer camp.  I went to Claire's ville last week to help out with this 3-day camp.  The mornings were about 4 hours of HIV Education and Life Skills.  Then in the afternoons, we played around 3 or 4 hours of soccer.  The entire thing was exhausting, but extremely fun.  I also think that the kids took a lot away from it.  I am so glad that I went to help because after seeing the programing and structure, I think I'll conduct this camp at my school.

So there comes a time in every volunteers service that their time here is drawing to an end.  For our 2009 Health and Environment class, that time has come.  Last weekend, we decided to have one last hoorah for our friends.  On Friday, we all made to trip to Mtwara town on the coast.  The beach house had been reserved so we spent a good weekend with friends, internet, and good food with a beach front view.  Not a bad way to go if you ask me.  We shopped, ate at the fish market, swam and celebrated the friendships that we've made in  such a short time.  I know that sounds really corny, but its amazing how quickly good friendships are formed over here.  In such a high stress, foreign environment, we count on each other for support.  I still talk to my family, but there are so many things that I feel I can't tell them.  They are already under so much stress by my being here, I would never want to aggravate that.  Therefore, you end up talking to other volunteers who understand what you are going through and more often than not have gone through the exact same thing.  It is so sad to see this class go, but we can only hope that they aren't replaced with a bunch of weirdos.  Heres hopin'!
In other news, school officially reopened this last Monday.  Hooray for my second term as a teacher.  Time really flies over here, almost exactly 10 months in fact.  Crazy.  Well sorry this was such a sappy post!  Peace out!

50th Anniversary Speech

So last month, Peace Corps Tanzania threw a big shin-dig to celebrate 50 years of Peace Corps.  This means a lot to the program as a whole and we have the honor of serving in one of the oldest programs here in Tanzania.  Love it!  I have been asked so many times why I would ever want to go to Africa, leaving all my friends and family behind.  The following exemplifies the feelings that all Peace Corps Volunteers have about our service.  After hearing this, I felt a renewed sense of purpose and pride.  I hope that all of you enjoy this as much as we did!

PCV Dan Waldron’s speech at the 50^th anniversary celebration - June 22, 2011

 

“Dr. Florens Turuku, Ambassador Lenhardt, Director Williams, Country Director Wojnar-Diagne. Distinguished guests, fellow volunteers, ndugu wenzangu. Take a moment to look around. We are not natural neighbors. We come from different generations, from different states and different countries, from different religions and backgrounds. But tonight we are united in a community of hope, brought together by an unshaken devotion to our common humanity. So it is tonight, and so it was at the beginning of our journey.

 

50 years ago a group of driven individuals arrived in what was then Tanganyika. It wasn’t a country yet, it wouldn’t be for four more months, and when they arrived, they were greeted by a sign which read “Beware the lions” And there we started. But who were these people, these reckless ambassadors? Reading the first curious accounts, the first letters home from a new frontier, one gets a sense of their characters. Who were they? They were George Schreiber, who talked about embodying “ a pioneer type of spirit”. They were George Johnson, who said “Peace Corps exists as an embodiment of a conviction that the best way to achieve global understanding is to put Americans in contact with other nations.” There were 35 of them, engineers, surveyors, and geologists, from Princeton, Harvard, Michigan. And they were drawn together by a man who stood on the steps of Ann Arbor and told the assembled students that based on “your willingness to not merely serve one year or two years in the service, but on your willingness to contribute part of your life to this country, I think will depend the answer whether a free society can compete.” 5 months later, the Peace Corps was signed into law, with Kennedy again telling us that “We will send those abroad who are committed to the concept which motivates the Peace Corps. It will not be easy:”

 

Across the nation, people were moved. They volunteered, they went to boot camp (Drill sergeant and all), and they became the first soldiers in an army of peace. 50 years later, that army has fought poverty, hunger, disease, and subjugation in 139 countries, side by side with peoples of every language, tribe, and religion. Kennedy’s words have outlived him. The army fights on. And though it sometimes feels as though our struggle is never-ending, battles have been won, progress has been made.

 

Yet for all the measurable progress, so much of what Peace Corps does is unquantifiable. There is no box that shows how amazed the children were when the seedlings began to grow, no graph to measure the change that occurred when a woman living with HIV when she realized she had become a leader. And more: how many Tanzanians knew, until the moment they were proven wrong, that Americans could never swing a jembe? How many Tanzanians did not believe that we could dance? And how many of us volunteers never guessed at the number of different ways life could be lived, and lived beautifully, until we came here? We knew about the poverty, but how little did we know about the generosity? These things may be unquantifiable, but they are no less real. Mwalimu Nyerere said "To measure a country's wealth by its gross national product is to measure things, not satisfactions." Many other organizations build more things. Yet I doubt there is another that builds more satisfactions.

 

Now where do we go from here? The goal of our work is to make the continuation of our work unnecessary. We are not there yet, in fact we are nowhere near the limits of our potential. Success is based on expectations, but it is also limited by them, and we are limiting ourselves, and our communities as long as remain prisoners to what Michael Gerson called “the soft bigotry of low expectations”. Let us never tire of pushing ever upwards. We have come so very far, Tanzanian and American alike, still we have so very far yet to go. This is a party to celebrate 50 years of friendship and accomplishment, but it can be more. Let us stand together tonight and take this anniversary as an opportunity to recommit to the spirit of the Peace Corps, to remember the sense of duty that brought us all here, to do better, to go farther, to try harder. We can expect far more from one another, but we can also offer far more of ourselves. American poet Robert Browning wrote, “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” Tonight we have a golden opportunity on this golden anniversary to not set limits on our potential, but rather expand our expectations.

 

I don’t know much. I left America a year and a week ago, and I’m just beginning to realize what I don’t understand. But I love this job. There is nothing like it. I said goodbye to everything and everyone I held dear, climbed onto a plane with a large group of strangers, got pushed out at 30,000 feet, landed, and began to plant trees, dig wells, and teach beekeeping. One day, mungu akipenda, I will get good at my job, at which point it will be time to leave. And after all of that, after the level of insanity I’ve put myself and my loved ones through, the thought that will keep me up at night: is how do I get back to Tanzania?

 

Because somewhere along the way, something changed. We came here as ambassadors from America, to show Tanzanians what America really is. But now…now we have become ambassadors to America, from Tanzania. For the rest of our days we will do all in our power to represent Tanzania: its beauty and its need, its poverty and its riches, its depth of generosity and humanity. The Kiswahili word for together is “pamoja”. It literally means “in one place”. And if that’s the case, none of us will ever be together again. A part of us never left America, the land of the free, the home of the brave. But a part of us will never leave Tanzania, “nakupenda na moyo yote”. That part of us will always be Tanzanian, rising with the sun, gripping the hands of strangers-turned-family, forever exchanging with unguarded smiles the news of the morning.

 

Because Peace Corps is not for everybody. As Kennedy said, “it will not be easy.” It isn’t ea   sy.It is painful, and it is lonely. But none of us here today have to be here. We could be living closer to our loved ones. We could be making more money. We could be cooler, or more comfortable, and God knows we could be cleaner. But each of us decided that there were more important things to us than comfort, that while a ship in the harbor may be safe, that is not what ships are built for. Everyone here tonight, Tanzanian and American, has dedicated a portion of their lives to the belief that with devotion, and kindness, and insistence on a brighter future, change is possible. Everyone here tonight is part of something greater than themselves. We are all soldiers in an army of peace. An army that marches on, as our President Barack Obama said, “with eyes fixed on the horizon and God’s grace upon us.”

A Great Vacation

Last episode of my blog, I left off while sitting in an amazingly Americanized coffee shop in Moshi.  So much as happened since and I have either not had internet or been too lazy to type.  So we hung out in Moshi about a week.  Basically all we did was lounge around and eat all kinds of food.  One day we did muster the strength to venture to the used clothes market, Memoria.  This trip was made a success when I purchased a rather snazzy Patagonia rain jacket.  We also did make a trip to Arusha.  Kathryn and I loaded up onto yet another bus, and made to short trip to Arusha.  After arriving, we had no idea where we were or where the guesti was so we wandered for a good amount of time.  After a suggestion from another volunteer, we finally found a place to stay that was within our budget, which was quite the quest in the jungle of high-end tourist hotels that is Arusha.  After getting to our room, we rested a bit and then later decided to explore the wonders of Shop-Rite.  This extraordinary find is a real-live grocery store.  Overall, we spent over an hour, browsing the aisle upon aisle of rarities such as raspberries, coffee creamer, and fresh-made breads and doughnuts.  Basically we were happier than Charlie was in the Chocolate Factory.  Oh commercial bliss!  After Shop-Rite, a.k.a. "Land o' Plenty," we met up with our friends that had just climbed Mt. Meru at a sushi restaurant.  When I say sushi restaurant, I mean it.  A Japanese expat had settled in Arusha, recruited a real sushi chef, and founded my favorite place in Tanzania.  We had dumplings and sushi and I was a happy, happy volunteer.  The next day, after attempting sushi again (alas the sushi chef has Tuesdays off) we headed back to Moshi.  After a few more days of hanging out, we loaded up onto my 7th bus in much to short of a time, we hopped over to Tanga, a region of the northern coast of Tanzania.  Around 6 1/2 hours later, we met up with all of our friends.  Overall, there were 20 volunteers gathered in Tanga for our 4th of July get-together.  The next day, we went swimming at a beach.  Swimming in Tanzania is always an awkward experience.  Everywhere I have been in this country, there is always a swarm of children, and sometime even adults, wanting to just stare at your glorious whiteness in your swimsuit.  Because of this feeling of being put on display, you must approach swimming with strategy.  First, you must get out of your clothes and wrap a towel around you as quickly as possible.  Next, approach the water fully concealed under your towel.  You must then drop your towel as close to the water as possible without the chance of it getting wet.  Then submerge your body in water up to your shoulders, there-by revealing nothing.  Luckily for our swimming experience this day, we were met by a hoard of other white people so the awkwardness level is significantly decreased.  The next day, on July 2nd, we celebrated the 4th of July early.  A couple of volunteers had arranged a boat to take us out to a sand bar.  We then spent most of the day on the sand bar, eating, drinking, and being merry.  Also swimming in the Indian Ocean.  This section of the ocean proved especially treacherous though.  We had one girl step on a sea urchin and then get to spend a good chunk of the day getting the spikes dug out of her foot and there were also jellyfish about.  The day was wrapped up at Toten Island, the Island of the dead, where there are a number of ancient German graves.  On that next Sunday, Kathryn and I, accompanied by a couple of our friends, bussed down to Dar es Salaam.  When we arrived, there was a bit of confusion and the bus did not stop where we needed it to, hence, we did not get our tickets to head back to Mtwara the next day.  Instead, we gorged on delicious Indian food.  The next day was the 4th of July, so we decided to celebrate with a Subway sub, Twix, and cold Pepsi.  We also went to the bus stand and bought our tickets for the next day.  That night, we celebrated our last night in Dar with Lebanese food.  Nom, nom, nom!!  The next day, we loaded up onto the bus, and headed back to home, sweet Mtwara.  We actually made it in record time too, pulling into Newala at 5:30 p.m.  It was glorious!  The next couple of days, I spent marketing and visiting with people.  I also spent almost an entire day washing my huge number of dirty clothes.  Overall though, there is no better feeling than getting home after a long spout of travel!  That's all for now folks!  Peace out!