Life in Mlango Mmoja

Hamjambo Familia na Marafiki!

Although there is lots that I could blog about tonight, I am feeling really lazy so I thought that instead I would share a few photos of my apartment and write a little bit about what it's like to live here... 

Our apartment is on the third floor of a three-story walk-up in an area called Mlango Moja. Most taxi drivers know the building if you just say the area because there are only a few apartments around here and enough Mzungo (white person) student interns have lived here over the past five years that it has become a safe assumption on their part. This is great since, as I mentioned in my last blog, I don't actually have a more specific address I could give them. Mlango Moja is a fairly busy area of Mwanza. We are surrounded by shops and markets so we have easy access to food and what-not, but it is also really loud outside. I mean, REALLY loud. Take what you are imagining, triple it, and you can almost grasp how loud it is. I have a sound machine app on my Iphone and ear plugs that I wear to bed, and yet the sound of dogs, cars, horns, people and loud speakers blasting music from the back of trucks (which is an oddly common occurrence here) still keeps me up most nights. In terms of location, walking 20 minutes in one direction will take me downtown, and walking 20 minutes in another direction will take me to the APYN office, where my roommates Emily, Susan and myself work each day. If we want to take a taxi it costs $3,000 TSH to get to either, or $1.50 CAD. 

The apartment is clean, fairly spacious, and equipped with most of what we need on a day-to-day basis. We have a house lady named Grace who comes three times a week to clean and take out our garbage. I didn't realize this before I arrived but Grace also does all our laundry (except for underwear) and will buy fruits and vegetables for us from the market if we leave her money and a list of things we want in Swahili. She can get a better price then any of us Mzungos ever could, and it keeps me from having to bargaining for prices, which I hate! Honestly, Grace is an invaluable asset to the interns here. She makes life so much easier, and although she speaks virtually no English, she is very sweet and often sings while she works, which I like. 

A balcony surrounds our apartment. You can access it from the living room, the kitchen and all three bedrooms. Yes, this means that including our main entrance, there are actually six doors into our very small apartment. This fact explains the nearly 100 keys that I found and put into a bag when I was cleaning the apartment last week. It seems that every time the locks have been changed since 2007, interns have been given new keys to all six doors. Still, I didn't want to throw any of them out, just incase.... This is probably the exact same thought process that lead to so many keys remaining here today. Anyways, the balcony offers very little privacy or shade, or peace, so it's not as ideal for things like reading or yoga as I had assumed before coming here.

Main Area (from entrance)

Dining Room 

(you can see our water filter on the left here, which we use instead of having to boil all our water to purify it)

One of two toilets (the other is above ground in the master ensuite). 

There are also two showers in the apartment and a hot water switch you turn on ten minutes before you want to shower.

Kitchen

(Note the mini fridge sticking out on the far right, which all three of us share and is the bane of my day-to-day existence)

Kitchen

My Room

My Room

 My Room (and daily reminder of love from Canada)

View from my balcony

View of the street from my balcony

View of the street from my balcony

Although the apartment is nice enough, my roommate Susan and I have decided to move into a house closer to the APYN office about three weeks from now. Currently this house is being occupied by our friends Megan and Shannon, but Megan is moving out in the middle of February and we are taking over the two remaining bedrooms. I wont get into too much detail right now about how awesome this house is, but it is AWESOME. Briefly, it is a gated home with a 24/7 guard (who carries a slingshot- yup.) and is surrounded on all sides by a garden possessing lime and papaya trees, hot pepper bushes and flowers. It is much bigger, more fully furnished and... wait for it... has a full-sized fridge and freezer. You don't even have to be a foodie/cook like me to understand how amazing this is for someone who is currently sharing a mini-fridge with two roommates in 30 degree heat. I can't wait! Photos to follow as soon as we move in.   :)

Well, that is all for now.

I love and miss you all so much.

Badaye!

Kate

Life Is Not About The Destination- It's About The Journey

Hamjambo familia na marafiki!

Though I am currently sitting in my apartment, safe, sound and unpacked, to say that my trip to Mwanza got off to a rocky start would be putting it lightly- very lightly. I know some of you have already been filled-in as to the chaos that was my journey to Tanzania, but for the rest of you, here goes... 

During my layover in Amsterdam airport my wallet, containing my drivers license, health card, two credit cards, debit card and just over $500 USD (all the money I had on me) was lost/stolen. Fortunately, I still had my passport and Schiphol has free wireless so I was able to contact my parents, who immediately cancelled and re-ordered all of my cards, and found a way to wire me money to the airport through Western Union. Bob Gough, my project director, sent copies of my Blue Cross medical insurance and recommended that I search through the garbages near to where I last had my wallet just incase someone took the money and threw out the rest. This strategy proved unsuccessful, and really only led to me, hyper-ventilating and in tears, picking through airport trash cans in public view. It was a low point for sure... I can only imagine I looked like that insane airport lady you hope to god doesn't later show up at your gate and sit next to you for 8 hours! 

I boarded the plane to Nairobi exhausted, frustrated and feeling rather sorry for myself. Yet, quite serendipitously, I was sat on the plane next to a man from Mali who works with UNESCO. When I told him about my wallet debacle he was extremely sympathetic towards me. Later on in the flight he told me that his country is currently at war and he has not been able to go back to see his family since early December. I felt embarrassed, even ashamed to have been going on about my wallet and poor me! Almost in shock, I tried my best to offer him the same sympathetic kindness he had shown me, but our situations were so drastically different that I didn't know exactly what to say. Sitting next to this man, Patrick, really helped to put things in perspective, and I left the plane much more grounded and self-aware than when I had boarded 8 hours earlier.

Once arriving in Mwanza I was told that my bags did not make it out of Amsterdam and that it would be at least two days until they could find them and deliver them to my apartment. The only problem was that I did not have an address that I could give them to deliver my bags to, nor did I have a phone they could call when they arrived. I ended up giving them what I thought was my roommate Emily's cell phone number, which I randomly had written down in my old field journal. Thankfully, it was the right number and they ended up calling me the next day to say they found my bags in Nairobi after all. When I asked my roommates for our address I found out that we don't actually have one. I know that sounds impossible, but it is just true. So the airport staff agreed to deliver my bags to a hotel in the general area of my apartment, which is called "Mlango Moja, so I could verbally direct them to my apartment.

My first night here I slept for 13 hours! My roommates Emily and Susan have been lovely helping me to get oriented and organized since I arrived. My second night here, Wednesday, they even planned a little welcome dinner for me at a restaurant nearby called the "Rich Man". Don't let the name fool you- they don't even have a menu, you just pick "chicken, fish, or goat". There was five of us all together: myself, Susan, two other UWO students from microbiology name Megan and Shannon, and another girl (well, I guess she is 30, but you know) named Sarah. Sarah is from a university in upper-state New York and is also conducting her PhD research in Mwanza on the impact of breastfeeding on maternal health. She has been living in Mwanza for a year already, and posesses a very realistic view of what it is like to live and conduct collaborative research in the city. Turns out Sarah's drink of choice in Tanzania is the same as mine: Konyage gin and mango juice. As is standard here, though it still cracks me up, the waiter brought us an entire mickey of gin and a half litre box of juice. We paid 6,000 Tsh (or about 4.00 CAD) for the whole lot and I took the remainder home in my purse. Typical.

Dinner was lovely. It was so nice to get out of the apartment and enjoy some drinks and good conversation. It felt.... normal, and to be honest, it really made me think "yeah, I can totally do this for four months", for the first time since I have arrived. 

Yesterday I went into the APYN office for the first time and said hello to the staff there: Ana, Esther, Tito and Celeste. We talked about some problems that have surfaced since I left pertaining to packaging, kitchen group dynamics, and, of course, funding. I then had the pleasure of letting them know that the conference is now fully funded thanks to the generosity of my incredible family and friends. I also enjoy letting them know that we received an additional donation of $1,000 from Kit Redmond and RTR Media, which could be put towards the conference workshops and current programming needs, as they saw fit. They were so excited! They had wanted to conduct a second series of workshops with the beneficiaries of the program (i.e. people living with HIV/AIDs who receive the yogurt for free) to discuss their needs and experiences relating to confidentiality of serostatus. What's happening is that the yogurt is sold to the local community and provided for free to the beneficiaries, who bring in their membership cards as identification. But when an individual shows their card and gets the yogurt for free, it can work to "out" them in their community as being HIV positive. So we are working, in consultation with the beneficiaries, to improve this system and RTR's donation with make this possible in the coming weeks. :)

I will start going into the office regularly from 9-4 beginning on Monday, and the plan is for us to go and see each of the ten kitchens over the next two or three weeks. I would have liked for the kitchen visits to happen faster, but the APYN staff are so busy that they can only physically make it out to visit 2-3 kitchens per week with all their other duties. And such is the pace of life in Tanzania! As we travel to each kitchen I will also be meeting the street/district leaders for the respective areas. This will be an important show of respect as visitors, and a great chance to feel out potential local leaders I can interview about the impact of the yogurt program for their communities.

Today I experienced my first power outage since moving to Mwanza, which lasted about six hours. Sans power, I took to cleaning the apartment top to bottom for three hours (true to form) while blasting Taylor Swift. 

I love and miss you each already. Thanks for reading! :)

Badaye ("later"),

Kate