Bat out of Hell....

Sunday evening I took a turn for the worse, after dinner I became extremely sleepy. I went to bed early the evening, around 9pm and awoke around 11pm and could barely control my bowels. Just before 2am I was vomiting and extremely dizzy, I didn’t know what was going on, I felt fine only five hours earlier. This continued for much of the night until I felt as though I purged everything in my body. The next morning Betsy ran out to pick up some Sprite, what a life-saver! I was bed-ridden for all of Monday and most of Tuesday, which is not the most pleasant scenario in Haydom. That is especially true when Betsy, on Tuesday came down with Giardia, AGAIN! I keep telling her to stop eating other people’s Pu, but it’s just so hard to remind her when I’m sitting in bed. I think Frank has the same problem sometimes.

To make a long story short, we planned our escape from Haydom while we were still sick as dogs, not knowing if we would make it. We left Haydom at 5:30am in the notorious Land Cruiser, yeah, that one! Thank god for oral rehydration salts, which taste horrible but made both of us feel a TON better that morning. After another grueling 5.5 hours to Arusha, we crashed at the Meru House Inn. I must say that was the second worst ride of my life although it paled in comparison to the first, we were able to finagle for the front seats!

After the much needed stop-over in Arusha, we boarded the Dar (not so) Express, for Dar es Salaam. We’re both enamored by the fact that it seems you can board this bus at any junction of your liking; we stopped in the most random of places to pick people up. It was nice to see the country-side of Tanzania; we went from mountainous rainforest, to grassy savannah, ending in the coastal tropics of Dar. Along the way we were shown a movie, Prey, probably the worst movie I’ve ever seen. I equate it to Jaws on land, although Steven Spielberg definitely did not direct this flick. I think Tanzanians love the crappiest of American cinema (reference prior post about Stupidest Animal Videos). Set in the Serengeti, a tour goes horribly awry! The tour guide is first eaten by a lion and drops the keys to the vehicle 100 yards away. Meanwhile, the entire pride of lions surround the car and the people are trapped inside, for days on end. Eventually, through a stroke of good luck, people find the car and semi-rescue the occupants only to be over taken by the large male lion. The woman in the movie somehow rigs the car with a gas-bomb and blows the whole thing to hell, making it out unscathed! Truly a great film, one for the ages.

Well, we arrived in Dar, and let me tell you, I’m considering staying here the rest of the time and sending Betsy back! It’s a pretty cool city, the little I’ve seen of it, which there is a lot of. Speaking of which, we’re itching to head to the beach, so I’ll cut this short. Kipepeo, here we come (That’s what I’m talking about, anthropology finally pays off)!
-Ryan

Adventures in beer buying

We’ve become more accustomed to life in Haydom. One of our major accomplishments was negotiating a crate of beer from the local distributer. In Tanzania, you HAVE to return the soda and beer bottles, so it’s quite a hassle to buy beer to take to your house, especially if you’re not returning empties. Also, men, such as beer distributors, seem to like to deal with other men rather than a mzungu woman.

On our beer-finding expedition, we walked up to a distributor, where of course, as in all Tanzanian stores, there were about 5 men loafing around, seemingly doing nothing but being nosy. As soon as wazungu walk up, they get interested. Ryan and I start looking around and I ask if we can buy a crate of Tusker. They look for our empty bottles, and realizing we have none, say they don’t have any Tusker. We can see it sitting 10 feet away from us. When I mention this fact to them, they tell Ryan that we need bottles. When Ryan stares blankly back in their direction, and I say that we will pay a deposit for the bottles, they ask Ryan how much. Finally, we are able to negotiate a price for the bottles, and the cost of the beer. This was a big purchase in Tanzanian, almost $40 for 24 beers and the bottles, so I wanted to be sure that when we returned the bottles, we’d get our money back. I made them sign a contract (a blank piece of notebook paper, which I wrote an agreement on in Swahili), which they thought was the weirdest thing in the world. You don’t get receipts here, let alone ever have to sign anything. We’ll see if the contract actually works, or if ANY of the random guys are there the day we return them…….I’ll keep you posted!

As we were getting the beer, Ryan looked around the corner of the building, then fled to the other side of me. At first I thought he was being paranoid or something, and didn’t notice the sloshing sound backgrounding my negotiations. Apparently, there was a guy standing in a bucket….stark naked….just outside of the beer distributor. After he finished his bath, he came to join the mob of people watching the wazungu try to get beer. Just one of the many random things you see walking down the street in Haydom.

After we successfully got and paid for our beer, our elation faded as we realized we had a mile-long walk back to the house, carrying 50 or so pounds of beer. We thought we were being smart by bringing a cloth to cover it while we carried it back, but nothing could cover up the distinctive sound of bottles clunking together. If possible, we were even more of a spectacle on this walk back than any other. When I say ‘we’ carried it back, I mean of course Ryan carried it back. He definitely got his workout for the day, and earned his luke-warm beer! The next day, we were sitting down, and he noticed 2 bruises on his legs. I got really worried that it was some kind of horrible bite, or crazy African disease (I can be a bit of a hypochondriac here), but then we realized it was from the crate banging on his legs as he walked! Anyway, now we’ve been enjoying Tusker at home on our evenings off, and remembering that in Tanzania, EVERYTHING is an adventure!

-Betsy

home

slightly faster internet connection, here are a few pictures of our new digs.

Celestial Excretions

Oh, the beautiful stars! I have never seen a sight so amazing in my life, well, I take that back, I have read a few National Geographic magazines and the pictures I snapped of the sky could possibly be published. Anyone out there know of an editor at NG that would want a photo of the Milky Way?! I promise to post them when we arrive in Dar, maybe a few weeks from now, give or take a few weeks… you know, Tanzi-time.

There was a bit of good news this morning, we received word that Betsy’s Fulbright funding will be sent out to us next week, that’s a load off our minds!

Speaking of pictures, we’ve received numerous requests to photo-document our elusive pet, Alfred, I promise, before I terminate our relationship, I’ll try to get a picture of him. I will have to apologize though, I usually have one thought in my mind when I see him, “die mother- #$@&er, die mother-#$@&er, die!” So, that being said, I may not have the will nor the strength to withhold dealing my great vengeance down upon his head (I’m currently reading the Bible, so the Pu-Blog may begin to have vengeful “god-like” references, for all of the heathens out there reading this, I feel your pain).

Well, we’ve been here, in Tanzania, a little over two weeks now and I feel as if the beginnings of what they call “culture shock” starting to infect my being. Everyday we walk by the same people, what they do all day long, I have no idea since they’re in the same spot at all times of their waking hours, who call out to us “WAZUNGU, WAZUNGU!” It never gets old to them, even if we pass by three or more times throughout the day! I’m definitely not a person who enjoys being the center of attention 24/7, so that is starting to wear on me. Yesterday, we met with the head-master of Haydom Secondary School, who is in one of the more respected positions in Tanzania. We met with him hoping to utilize him as a resource for studying adolescent nutrition in his school. Right off the bat he began telling us his life story and how his parents died ten years ago, it was a pretty sad story, but then went on to explain how he always wanted to be a doctor and it was never his intent to be a school head-master. After about fifteen minutes of the “sob-story”, he asked us to sponsor him so he could go back to school and become a doctor!

After a long explanation of how we too are students and cannot afford helping him, we retreated into the hospital compound where we found a Tiki-hut in the backyard their housing. Betsy and I promptly made ourselves feel at home here, over-looking the valley below, tucked away from curious eyes of Tanzanians. For me, this was the most comfortable place I’ve been since arriving here. We were alone, no one bothering or soliciting us; we were able to just become lost in our thoughts. Unfortunately, we only had a short “vacation” there, since we do not live within the hospital gates. We are currently living like true anthropologists; our life is a constant ethnography, as Betsy explained in the previous post. I’m not an anthropologist nor do I plan to become one, thank god because I’m just too ethno-centric!
-Ryan

adventures in ethnography

Well, things are moving along, and I feel like we’ve gotten a good start, albeit slow, on our study. Sometimes, when daily life is so monumentally alien to us (bucket showers, no internet, pit latrines, oh my!) it’s easy to forget that we’re here to actually do work! We will be researching adolescent nutrition in the Haydom area and ultimately trying to understand ways to make culturally-based nutrition programs targeting adolescents. It seems to be a very neglected topic here, with most health outreach focusing on maternal and child health and HIV. We are the only wazungu living outside the hospital compound, which puts us in a 24-hour a day ethnography. We’ve already learned a TON in the past 2 weeks and haven’t formally started the study yet. We went with the outreach clinic to a village yesterday about 45 minutes away from Haydom, and the difference between food resources was amazing! To us Americans, Haydom seems like a barren food waste-land, with few pre-packaged foods (soda, a handful of cookies, some peanut butter, and that’s about it – there is one type of canned cheese and a bottle of Alter Wine in the ‘wazungu’ shop in town, and if you know us, that’s going to make for a long 10 months). In the village there was even less, a few greens, onions and mangos being sold, and some generic cookies. In interviewing people, their diet was amazingly monotonous, especially now, in the dry season when the crops aren’t growing and the wild vegetables and fruits aren’t available. Basically, they eat a stiff maize dough called ugali, and maybe some milk, beans and greens if they are lucky.

We’ve spent the past week and a half meeting people, and preparing our research materials, namely taking pictures of local foods for a pile-sorting exercise. I don’t know what I would do without my #1 research assistant Ryan who’s graphic design skills have been indispensible! We’re both excited to get them done and get the final research clearance so we can try them out (ok, I’m excited for the nerdy anthropology part of it, Ryan’s just excited to get moving).
-Betsy

icky-sicky

Phew, through one solid week at our new home and we’ve definitely been given a wake-up call. I was ill on Tuesday but recovered nicely but just as that passed I started to have the beginnings of a bloody nose. If you know me well my bloody noses are infamous, which usually end hours later, my nose being cauterized and leaving me light-headed. Naturally, this scared the Pu out of me, what are we to do? We went to the hospital to buy a styptic pen (silver nitrate), which is the cauterizing agent on the end of a long wooden cotton swab. Apparently, Haydom Hospital doesn’t have anything for cauterization, good to know if either of us begin bleeding profusely we’re hours away from the nearest functioning medical facility. Another item that eludes our grasp here is a tube of Neosporin, which is the most basic of items to have on hand!

Betsy, on Saturday evening began to feel ill herself, the next morning she was unable to get out of bed, not good. She burped once and I caught a whiff of it, I remember Vikas emailing me and telling me about sulfur smelling burps being Giardia. Giardia is a stomach infection transmitted through fecal matter, yuck! As her state continued to worsen we decided she should take antibiotics. Good thing, she’s feeling much better today, so much so that she was actually able to eat breakfast. So far it’s been quite the test, physically and mentally for both of us, hopefully as we become more and more accustomed our surroundings, life here will become easier. I knew we would both become ill through our time here but never thought it would be so soon. Hope all is well back home, I wish I could drink tap water right about now…
-Ryan

BFE Africa!

It’s like we are in rural Africa! We were without electricity from 3pm on last night, again, seems to be common occurrence, three times a week or so, give or take a day. Luckily, the family has on stock a large quantity of “shumaa”, or candles in English, which lit that evening’s dinner. I have a feeling Betsy and I will have “romantic” dinners quite often here, much to our chagrin because the darkness usually invites the buibui, or spiders the size of Betsy’s head, out of the walls. We have affectionately named one of the extraordinarily nimble spiders, Alfred; though not as cuddly as Frank, our dog, it may possess superior intelligence. We currently have a running tally of insects killed, Betsy is not as adept to killing as I am, although I definitely do not possess a “killer-instinct” myself.

Betsy: 4 roaches, 2 mini-spiders, 2 centipedes

Ryan: 4 GIANT spiders (gross!), 3 roaches, 3 mini-spiders, countless flies and the largest beetle I have ever seen! So large that I had to run and get Betsy to look at it before I took the howitzer to it.

Life here has been alright, I love the family we’re living with, however, I’m still trying to adjust to Tanzanian culture. There is a saying here, “Tanzanians are not like Westerners who like to have everything finished today, we leave the hardest tasks for tomorrow.” This mentality has been a stick in our spokes on a daily basis, which I’ve lovingly termed, Tanz-time, and has driven me nuts from the day we arrived. I am not an anthropologist, that is for sure and watching the paint dry is definitely not a coveted past-time for me, so this experience, albeit great so far, has had its definitive points of frustration.

The past few nights, especially the ones without electricity, have been quite spectacular, celestially speaking. A few nights ago I witnessed an amazing sight, the Milky Way, which is all but impossible to see in the US. Every part of the sky was lit-up with twinkling, yes they actually do twinkle, stars and there wasn’t a dark spot to be seen. Venus, which is high right now, was so incredibly bright is was hard to take my eyes off of while the rest of the stars come in a brilliant array of colors ranging from bright white down to a pale brown. It was one of the more incredible things I’ve seen in my adult life and wish all of you could see it. I will try to perfect my aperture timing over the next few nights and upload the pictures when we are in Dar. I have to apologize for the lack of pictures over the past week, Haydom’s internet connection shares the same mentality of its people, Tanz-time.
-Ryan