Miaka Hamsini (50 Years)

Friday (Dec. 9) marked the 50th anniversary of Tanzania's independence. This is quite the year for we PCVs because it's also the 50th year for PC Tanzania. Apparently there was a giant celebration in Dar on Saturday with all of the living previous presidents. Congrats to Tanzania! The newspapers pointed to corruption and poverty as being the biggest problems still facing the country today. I don't know too much about the political system here yet, but from what I've heard the current party in power (CCM) has pretty much remained in power since independence. I heard that in the last election there was a record number of votes for alternative parties, so hopefully the peoples' voices can be heard if they are looking for a change.

Like I mentioned last time, we got to meet with a Peace Corps volunteer who served in Tanzania back in 1961, so he was part of the first ever group of Peace Corps. The guy we met was named Tom, and his partner from the same group (named Jerry, coincidentally enough) was supposed to come but couldn't make it. Still it was great to talk with him. He studied civil engineering in school and actually served before his senior year of college. In TZ he was working in Morogoro, making the road that goes to Dar, which has to be one of the most frequently traveled roads in the country today. We watched an NBC video from the 60's that was made of the first class of PCVs. It was kind of funny seeing the training that they went through - it was more of a boot camp than anything else. They did obstacle courses and intense physical training as well as language and culture study. I think it would be cool if we still had some of that today, but things have definitely changed a lot over 50 years. A lot of the rural areas of the country we saw in the video though really didn't look different at all from some of the places I've been. There definitely are plenty of places that are still as poor as they were 50 years ago.

Also last week we got to meet with our new Country Director, Elizabeth, or EB as she likes to be called. She told us about her time in Tanzania (she lived with a group of the famous Maasai tribe around the central part of the country for a few years) and as a Country Director in Uganda. She is very nice and still remembers alot of Kiswahili. Andrea is now gone to Nepal, and was very sad to leave us. She blamed us though for her leaving because she said the Peace Corps Director was very impressed when he came to visit us back in June, and that encouraged him to have her start the new Nepal program.

The rest of training went well - we got a lot of good resources for starting different student clubs at our schools, for education about HIV/AIDS, malaria, and general life skills. I also got a lot of good computer teaching tools like typing practice games and geography puzzles that will be very helpful for my teachers and students back at school. I also got some pointers from another volunteer on new origami things to make with my post-it notes, though the cranes are still my favorite by far. And of course our IST Prom was a huge success. The theme was "socks on hands" (don't ask...) and we had our own 90's music dance party at Dragonaire's, which many locals ended up joining. A few of us had been growing out our beards for IST, and Justin and I decided to get creative with ours. I'll leave it to you all to see the pictures for yourself, but someone suggested that I looked like a long-lost third Mario brother (named Guisseppe, of course), which I was happy to accept. But I couldn't really live with that for more than one day, so now it's back to square one. Maybe we will see who can grow theirs until Mid-service conference next Fall...

After IST I got to spend some time with my host family in Morogoro. They are all doing well, and I told my one host sister that her letter to America was received by Christine and that she would get one back soon, and she was so excited. I'm sure it was in very good English too, all of those kids speak amazingly well for their age. But my baba invited me to go with him to visit his family in Moshi, so we took a trip there for a couple days, and oh man, was it beautiful. They live right at one of the main gates to Kilimanjaro National Park, so you can see the mountain from their yard! We went to the park to look around, and it was great. He also has a lot of friends who are hiking guides, and they offered for me to come back next year and that I could use them to hike the mountain, without getting ripped off like most tourists. So I'm really excited about that and extremely lucky to have such an awesome baba!

It will be nice to have some quiet time back at my site after doing a lot of traveling. Christmas will be fun though, since I'm sure it will be a big group of us getting together. Hope everyone is doing well with their Christmas shopping and enjoying the snow if you have it. I've found some pretty hilarious Christmas decorations at random stores here that should go well with our Charlie Brown tree. My goal now is to translate The Night Before Christmas to read on Christmas Eve. Look for it coming soon and welcome to read both versions yourself if you'd like a little Tanzanian zest added to your holiday celebrations.