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Golly, it's good!
Can't believe I spent 20000/= yesterday though - that's ten pounds!!!! It's Sunday today as well so I have to make what I brought with me last(about 10000/=). At least the rest of today's food will be free - we were supposed to arrive today so from now on SPW will pay food/accommodation for us being here (Nick & I moved our bags to the rooms first thing, and even managed to charm them into letting us join in this morning's breakfast - bread & melon, which didn't stop us moving on to Hasty's for porridge and french toast). Will be out for a few drinks tonight again, though, so must watch those pennies.
Didn't go to Ruaha disco in the end last night - stayed in Bottom's up from late afternoon watching the football, then carried on drinking 'til the rugby came on (pretty dismal really - chelsea and france both
winning on the same day - at least leeds lost). At the end of the night Chloe (SPW staff)'s friend gave us a lift back on the back of a truck, which is great fun after a few drinks at 1 in the morning.
Anyway, I'm sure you all want to hear about the village, rather than how jolly Iringa town is, so I'll put you out of your misery. If the email subject still doesn't make sense, it's probably because I just realised I haven't explained it - for the last week and a half we've been getting very efficient at scavenging food, as we were down to rice, wheat flour, onions, garlic, verious spices, chilly sauce, and jam, so a balanced diet it has not been recently. Although, like I say, we're professional scavengers now and did very well, particularly when it came down to vegetables - evryone else was stocked up on veggies ages ago, so the shop only sells tomatoes.
Started teaching in the school last week, which is so much easier than the community seminars - roomfuls of children are infinitely less intimidating, even if they are completely unresponsive. I can also get involved much more by speaking in English if I don't know the Swahili - they're always keen to learn English so we can make that a feature of a lesson, and Vende can translate. Just being in school has helped me remember loads of English songs and games we can do with them, too - up until now I've only been able to remember rude university sports team drinking songs, and I don't think they're necessary the most appropriate material to introduce to the classroom.
Because we're generally teaching the same lessons to three different classes, the first class to get each lesson is gonna get a bum deal, and it will probably turn out to be standard VI, who are far more intelligent/confident that standards V and VII. After each lesson I keep on thinking of a new picture we can draw/game we can play to help them remember the material.
It's really hard getting them involved though (particularly with Standards V & VII) when they have so little confidence and they're used to the teacher standing at the front of the room, and talking at them/writing on the board while they copy, and when they are so used to receiving corporal punishment for pretty tame misbehaviour.
The community seminars on AIDS/HIV went pretty well - it was the same one to different sub-villages. Most of them were at the village office in the centre, but the last one was in the middle of their sub-village (Mifugo, I think) and when we got there, there were loads of people (quite a lot of youth, too, which is good, as they're one of our target groups) waiting outside an ulanzi bar. They told us it was across the road, so we crossed over to discover the seminar was to be held in another ulanzi bar - luckily no one was too pissed so it actually just made the meeting much more lively and people were much less inhibited to taking part (though there was one old drunk who sat at the front next to me and shouted out randomly in Kihehe every so often - so we couldn't understand what he was saying).
Talking of drunks, we went to Nundwe a couple of times in the last couple of weeks to visit the volunteers there, and saw something way beyond the drunkenness in our village. In Ihalimba, along the main road, there are a few small copses of bamboo plants (which is what ulanzi is made from, not sugar cane, as I was previously told), and there are quite a few ulanzi bars (and ulanzi drunks) around the village. In Nundwe, there are fields and fields of bamboo plants in which ulanzi is being produced on a near-industrial scale, and every other building seems to be an ulanzi bar (there's one shop in the village square and everything else is an ulanzi bar).
The first time we went to Nundwe, we walked, and it was the day after getting back from being ill in Iringa. It ended up taking two and a half hours to get there, and I was completely wrecked (I was obviously a bit weaker and a bit shorter of stored energy than I thought), so I stayed the night rather than walk back the same day. There's a bloke there who comes to play cards with them in the evenings, and their house is the old village office, which is now the dispensary (they live with the woman who runs that, and her young daughter). When he found out that I was staying the night, he kept on trying to give me condoms, and we had some difficulty explaining that that wasn't why I was staying. Well, at least they've got through to someone in Nundwe - everyone else is too pissed to care.
I think I'll leave it at that, because there's so much I could say in addition but I wouldn't know where to start.
Pambele (later in Kihehe)
Phil :)
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