Trash

written 5/9

By this time in the year I was certain that I would have our ‘trash problem’ figured out. If you read my posts from early on you may remember that I spent time puzzling over how to reduce the volume of trash that we burn. I am sad to say, I still have not found an answer.

There are containers and plastic bags that are clearly reusable and so we clean and save these. We throw all of our food out the door so that it can be eaten by the bugs and animals. There are a number of things that the kids enjoy playing with, so we hand these objects off to them, knowing full well that after the kids destroy them they will end up littered between the walkways. Other than that, we really have no idea what to do with things other than burn them.

Because of this, we have piles of potentially usable objects stashed in our house with the hopes of one day figuring out what to do with them. We still have a number of containers of stuff left from last year that we put in our extra room and have never dealt with. We have piles of cardboard boxes in the corner from packages we have received and we just kind of leave all of the unusable metal things in a pile (aluminum lids from food, broken radio antenna, batteries.) The room accidentally just turned into a jungle gym for the cockroaches because we have no idea how to get rid of/ effectively use most of the stuff in it.

Most of the time this becomes just background noise to my life- I put the trash in the garbage bag like normal at home, I never spend time in our room-of-stuff-we-don’t-know-what-to-do-with, and none of it’s a big deal. Every time I take out the garbage, however, I am faced with it again. In the US, we have a culture of ignoring trash. We hide it from sight and forget about it. Having to burn my own trash disrupts this pervasive mindset and always forces me to re-confront (with guilt) the fact that I am consuming goods whose remnants have no role other than to be destructive. This was even more glaringly obvious this last time when the fire I started burned a brilliant green.

Having to face my trash is not only breaking me out of the mindset, but helping me to deconstruct it. In the US we don’t actually have any better way to deal with our trash- we just make it the government’s responsibility instead of the individual’s. What I’m doing here with my trash is not actually that much more problematic than what happens to my trash at home.

The one difference is that at home we can recycle paper and metal. When I burn trash here what I really want are systematic ways to reuse all of the trash. That’s what recycling does and what turning the peanut butter containers into holders for rice and lentils does. However, the reason why I have so many things to burn is that there are no systems put in place or obvious reuses for so much of my trash. The plastic/paper/aluminum foil juice containers are gross inside from the molding juice, are too strangely- shaped to be used as a container, and have too many materials in them for them to be broken up even if there was recycling.

I grew up with messages about buying things that have less packaging, but on a personal level it feels so hard to do that. The protein bars from home get me through my days, the snack foods from Korogwe really brighten my life (I get so tired of rice, beans, pasta, and fresh veggies), and the soup mixes from Dar (a new flavor!) make meals so refreshing. I feel silly that I don’t want to make a better choice for the planet (which really, is way more important than I am), but the idea of giving up these few and far between luxuries sounds like such a horrible option.

In college I was introduced to the idea of cradle to grave design in which the design of a product and its packaging includes design for its disposal. This includes products such as printer ink cartridges that you can bring to a store and get refilled, computer parts that can be sent back to the manufacturer and placed into another computer (which means not updating the design too often), and (for a third world country) beer bottles that can then be used to build houses (http://inhabitat.com/heineken-wobo-the-brick-that-holds-beer/). Although I thought it was an intelligent idea then, now I feel like I truly understand the need. If every piece of packaging that I bought had an obvious new use or place to bring it (like the glass coke bottles I’m now used to drinking from), then I wouldn’t have any trash to burn. That would be truly wonderful.

 

Balance

written 5/2

The fact that we live in the villages with the people we work with in 2Seeds is unique, but also presents some difficulties. It means that there is not often any different between the tasks you do for work and the tasks you do for yourself. In addition, because we live in the villages, we live like the villagers, which is a task in and of itself.

The women here are hard workers and spend their days just working to maintain the cleanliness of their lives and keep their children fed. Their responsibilities as women and mothers and sisters mean that they do all of the cleaning, cooking, childrearing, and work such as getting firewood and water. If it is not farming season, they spend huge amounts of their time cooking, washing up the pots, cleaning all of the clothes, and keeping the house clean. All of these activities are done without electricity, so they must be done between about 7am and 7pm and all of the cleaning is done by hand which necessitates spending time on each and every spoon and shirt.

I have found all of this cooking and cleaning incredibly hard to keep up with. Because of this I have skipped a huge number of meals, take showers less often than I should, have started paying someone to wash my clothes, and I rarely clean all of the dirt out of the house in the way that should be done. I have such difficulty in part because of the enormous amount of time it takes to do all of these activities. Because every meal must be cooked from scratch it takes me at least an hour to prepare a full meal. This means to eat lunch and dinner daily I am spending around 3 hours a day cooking and eating. If I do make two full meals a day I have to wash all of the dishes, which is often another hour of work if I cooked something that must be scrubbed from the pots.

This leaves me feeling that I have very little time for work. Add to the time investment that life without electricity requires the fact that my work here has also included designing a project and getting it off the ground, I have often felt as though I could not manage all of the work I’ve had to do.

This sense of being overwhelmed has lessened as our project has become more concrete. Now that we have clearer goals and tasks to achieve, I can feel good about our achievements and take breathers. Earlier in the year it felt as though we had to spend all of our time on project work because there was an unlimited amount of work to be done.

However, there are still aspects of life here that I have trouble balancing. There are still days in which I feel that I have to choose between spending my time completing a project task (that once completed is done) or doing cleaning (which will just have to be repeated as soon as things get dirty again.) I suppose this is a challenge in life in the US as well, but here things get dirty so much faster. I’m not sure that there’s any great solution to this aside from more deliberately choosing how I spend my time, but the nature of this job in which life and work are all bound up into one continues to be difficult to navigate.

 

The World Has Bloomed

written 4/27

I’ve tried my best in this blog to convey what it feels like to be in a world where everything depends on rain, and yet there is none. Things feel desperate, hopeless and achingly dry.

In this last month, however, rain has come and the world has exploded. Hope has returned to Tabora and a flurry of activity has transformed the town. Everyday people go to their farms to plant and weed and care for their crops and the town is deserted. Despite this fact that no one is at home during the day, you can still feel the flurry of activity. People are thinking, planning, scheming. A semblance of control has returned to people’s lives- as long as the rain keeps coming, the amount that they work determines how much food they produce.

For us it means that planning is more challenging- there is not telling when someone will be home, if they will spend four hours at their farm or twelve, and if it will rain and cause people to stay at home instead of coming to a meeting. We’re trying to think of ways to keep moving our project forward while working around this new fact of life. However, I don’t begrudge it in the least because it means that our partners and friends and the villagers will have food, which I consider to be more important than any meeting of ours. It does mean that the structure of 2Seeds is a bit hard for non-farming projects because just as we are gearing up to leave and do a final push, our partners are unavailable.

The rain also means that the environment has transformed. When I went to Lutindi last December, I was bowled over with how much green there was and I spent a few hours sitting by one of the mountain streams just enjoying the view and the sounds. Now, however, Tabora has turned into a green flourishing place. Vegetables are sprouting from the ground, corn is waist-high, and the dusty brown has been replaced with shocking bright green. It’s refreshing to look at and gives me so much joy to know that the people in Tabora might be able to eat for the rest of this year. The roads to and from Korogwe are filled with mud and, on one especially wet day, were flooded so much that we had to drive the motorcycle through the water.

I absolutely love it, as someone who thoroughly enjoys rain and lush plant life. I go to bed happy every night because the birds are chirping more, fireflies are out, and I fall asleep every night to a chorus of frogs.

 

Ruminations on connectivity

written 4/25

I’ve spent much of the last week in Korogwe, the city near Tabora, so that I could be available to talk to potential employers. We have a house in Korogwe with electricity and wireless internet and scores of bunk beds for us to stay in when we come into town for meetings. Most of the PCs absolutely hate this house because it’s hot, filled with bugs (there are an amazing number), and is always dirty. I am perfectly content with it, but I have trouble dealing with the massive amounts of complaining about the house that occurs when we all come into town for a meeting (I admit that it’s hard to live in a house with 13 other people, but I think complaining about it only makes it worse).

When we come into town we all dive onto our computers and often have hours of silence in which ten of us will be in the same room just staring at our screens. When the electricity goes out (which it often does), we will all look up and start hanging out until it comes back on again.

I tend to take this behavior to the extreme among our group- I can spend the entire time that I am in the city on my computer and be perfectly content. I’m not sure quite what it is, but I seem to crave the connectivity more than the other PCs here. In part I know that it’s because I miss learning, and so I spend huge amounts of time online reading blogs and news and articles to learn about the topics I’m interested in. I really love reading non-fiction and there aren’t many non-fiction books here on the topics I want to be learning about, so I have to do that when I have internet. In part I know that it’s an escape- being online allows me to feel normal and ignore all of the things going on in my life. The noise, the heat, my exhaustion, the dirt don’t bother me when my mind’s engaged and it allows me to get away from the emotional toll of this experience. However, there’s something just magnetic about the screen itself- I can just play silly card games for hours on the computer and be content.

I recently talked to a friend who quit their job because they had to be in front of a computer all day and hated it. When I get the chance here, that is all that I do, so I wonder if I would be happy in a computer-based job. It’s also possible though that I just act this way here because it is such a contrast to my day-to-day life in Tabora.

I’m thankful that I have gotten to do this program at a time when the internet is wide-spread enough that we can have a fast connection in a fairly small city in a very poor country. The ability for me to stay so connected to people at home has truly been a gift and I’m not sure I could have dealt with how emotionally difficult this experience has been without it. My little sister is signed into Skype for 80% of her waking hours, so anytime I need to vent or feel a bit of home I chat her. The internet also allows me to have a semblance of normality in my life, because going online here is just like going online at home (we thankfully have a connection speed fast enough to make this possible) and I get to keep up to date on the things that are happening in the US and live vicariously through the photos of my friends on Facebook.

Our wireless is bought on a monthly schedule and so close to the end of each month our internet goes out without warning. It went out yesterday and I started thinking about internet as a limited resource. So much of this year is about living on less than I am used to and having to learn the mindset I need to have in order to do this. I don’t do this with internet because we have almost unlimited access in Korogwe. However, every time it goes out here I get annoyed that I didn’t use my time more wisely and finish all of the important work I had to do before surfing on my blogs and wandering around the internet. Every other limited resource that we have here we can visually see its limit (or we can predict when we will run out, such as learning how many days a carrot will last before it goes bad.) I think this visual calculation is incredibly important for humans to conserve, which is part of why American culture runs on mass consumption- our ability to see the origins and limits of the resources we use has been undone.

One of the things that this year has taught me is how much I value having computers in my life. I also truly appreciate our access to information, which is something that makes us appear very knowledgeable to the villagers, but really just means we have more tools at our disposal to learn things. It’s been an interesting experience to see how much growing up with the internet shapes the way we conceptualize the world. We care much less about learning things from experts and have a can-do attitude that we can know most anything just by looking it up. We also have a sense of entitlement to information and it’s frustrating for us when we can’t get it (for example, there isn’t very specific information about how to grow plants in our area or translations of the Swahili/local language names for plants into English.) In contrast, our partners take knowledge as it comes to them and many of them voice a lot of enthusiasm for the opportunity to learn new things because these are not opportunities they come across very often.

 

Ready to Leave

written 4/25

I have about two and a half months left as a part of 2Seeds. In a week, two other PCs are going home, having opted to do a nine month program instead of an eleven month one. I’m also in the midst of talking to a potential employer for next year, so I could have my year planned out within the week if things work out. This week my parents bought me and my sister tickets for a play in August after I come home.

All of these things combined means that I’m feeling ready for this year to be over. If I could fast-forward to July and just not have to experience the next two months, I would. I’m feeling tired because this year has taken so much effort. At this point I would much rather be able to look back and be grateful for all of the things this year has given me than be in the thick of it and wonder what I’m getting out of this.

It doesn’t help that our women are off working on their farms and that I have spent a lot of time this week in the city and so haven’t gotten to enjoy any of the wonderful things about Tabora. My head is full of future thoughts and planning my next steps and career and contemplating living expenses and work weeks and cell phone contracts.

I’m sure that this is a temporary feeling and that in a week or so I will feel like my time here is too short and I want to stay longer. We have a limited amount of time to really make sure our project is on the right track and so at some point the need to accomplish as much as I can before I leave will kick in. For the rest of my time here I will probably fluctuate between feeling like this experience has gone on for much too long and that I need more time here.

 

A Changing Landscape

written 4/14

Coming from a land of buildings, I assume that structures and walkways are fairly permanent. When I first arrived in Tabora I spent a bit of time making a map of the place, marking out all of the houses and trees and paths.

However, I have now come to see that this place is a much more dynamic environment than I originally assumed. I have seen about 10 houses torn down or built in my time here. Because the houses are built wherever there’s space and not necessarily next to a street and sidewalk, as they are in the US, a new house can grow in an unexpected place and really change the paths you use to get around. My mother has a joke that the hobby in the community we live in is remodeling. That joke could almost apply here as well, except that at home people remodel because they have enough money and would prefer for their house or yard to look differently, and here it is because houses fall down and need constant upkeep to maintain them as safe living spaces.

The ground here is caked down and hard and dry. In between walking paths are small green patches. Although many of the paths have stayed the same throughout the year, this division is not static in the least. I have seen people hoe perfectly flat pieces of dirt into green patches and I have seen green patches become hard and flat. Early on we did an inventory of gardens in town. Just as the flowerbeds in my front yard don’t cease to be flowerbeds as the year rolls on, I thought these gardens were locations I could write on the map so that there location would be known to all future Tabora PCs. I have seen many of these gardens wither and die as the rain left and they stopped being cared for and, now that the rains are beginning to return, a few are resurfacing. Ana had told us that over the summer she saw a large number of gardens that we did not find any evidence of in our inventory. I know understand that it is because they withered with the sun and the idea of keeping up a garden regardless of rainfall is not practiced here.

It’s been really interesting to see this change and to recognize that because Tabora is less of a built environment, things move in a way that is closer to nature. I didn’t realize that impermanence is part of living in a less industrialized way. I’m sure that this lack of permanence (or the idea that not all change is driven by progress) powerfully impacts the way that Taborans understand their lives and that is a mindset that I am just starting to understand.

 

Being a 23-Year-Old Mother

written 04/13

When I was a child I decided I was going to have my first kid at 26; now that age seems way too soon and I’ve pushed it back to mid or late 30’s. Here however, I’ve gotten asked many many times why I don’t have kids yet- it’s fairly common for your first child to be born when you are around 20.

I’ve never had a friend my age with a child (most of my friends went to four-year colleges and were focused on getting their BA), so it’s a new experience for me to be around young women with kids. Two of my best friends here, Mama Amina and Mama Mwaliko, are both about 21 and have kids. Mama Mwaliko is actually the birth mother of two children, but she is the mother to three older ones as well.

In my mind, I do not have the capacity to be a mother at this age. I’m too irresponsible, I’m still learning how to take care of myself, I’m not ready to settle down and make big life decisions. However, what hanging out with these women has shown me is that it’s not my age, but the cultural stage of life I’m in. If I decided today that I was going to live in Tabora forever, many of my objections would disappear. I wouldn’t be solely in charge of the kids- their grandparents and aunts would help take care of them as well. I wouldn’t have to worry that having a child would impede my ability to have a social life because here a woman’s life includes being a mother and having children, and so kids do not inhibit your ability to have friends or shape how you spend your time as they do in the US. Most importantly, I feel that it is important for me to get a career and make sure that I can provide for children before I have them. Here in a village, the idea of making money before you make life decisions is nonsensical. You work starting when you are old enough to help out on the farm and you continue farming your whole life. You never have to ‘find a career’ and money is not something that is necessarily saved up for large expenses down the road in the same way. I have never talked to someone here who said they waited to have children until they could afford it.

I thought I was just too young to have kids, but being here has shown me that this is much less about my age and much more about the circumstances of my life. I think I could be a perfectly fine mother at this age, just not in America. Here I would have all the resources I needed to make sure my children grew up as well as any child can in rural Tanzania, but having a kid right now in the US would shortchange my children and make both their and my lives harder.