Village

My Tanzanian Partner and I spent our first week in our village last week. We were there to do a situational analysis of the village before returning to Iringa for one more week of training. Our Village is called Igula. It has a population of about 1300 and it's about 4 hours from Iringa. But we are near the town of Njombe which is where our monthly meetings will be held. The village next door is called Ilembula and has about 3,000 people. We will be working in both villages through out our placement. The village chairman or Mwenye Kiti was in charge of escorting us to the village from Iringa and setting up our housing. However, community leaders in rural Africa play by their own rules. They really have no one to answer to and can choose to cooperate or not to cooperate based on a whim. They are kind of like spoiled hollywood actressses with little real respondsiblity and a lot of influence or star power. If Mwenye Kitis are hollywood celebrities than our Mwenye Kiti is Paris Hilton, a complete flake. He was "sick" and did not come to Iringa to escort us to Igula. Fortunately we are only 20 minutes from another village with two other SPW volunteers in it and we traveled with them and their Mwenye Kiti. It was pretty obvious from the beginning that we are of little to no importance to our village leader. He had done absolutely no work on the house we were supposed to live in. The house is huge. It has 4 bedrooms and an indoor toilet but it was basically abandoned and had not been lived in in years. Devota and I spent hours cleaning out all the spiderwebs and sweeping and mopping the cement floors. We spent the week sleeping on the floor because our Mwenye Kiti did not get us beds. The house has no electricity or running water and halfway through the week the water in the entire village went off and we were fetching water from the one well in the village about a 1/4 mile away. I learned to carry a bucket of water on my head very quickly. You use neck and back muscles you never knew you had! Hopefully Paris Hilton will get his act together and we will get beds and the water turned on in our house. Things will be ten times more comfortable than they were for the first week if it happens. I thought our housing situation was really bad until I got back to Iringa and talked to some of the other volunteers about their housing. At least we don't have an outdoor pit toilet with mud floors and no roof. And thank God we don't have rats! At least not yet. Some of the other volunteers houses are swarming with them already. There is a friendly cat that lives next door that I'll bring over if I do see a rat. Apparently a house cat is the one good way of getting rid of rats in Tanzania.

Other than the housing debacle our placement is really great. We have a Lutheran hospital in the next village and the volunteers that were there in 2006 did a great job so SPW has an excellent reputation within the community. We already have a small group of enthusiastic young people that want to get involved in the community action group for out of school youth and Ilembula has at least 7 solid football teams that want to participant in our sports league. The Lutheran hospital has a HIV testing clinic and a support group for people living with HIV/AIDS. It also has this amazing orphanage with 10 children under 4. They are the most beautiful things I've ever seen and each of them has a very sad sorry about how they got there. One little baby girl was so small and precious I picked her up and held her for a good hour. She could barely hold her head up and I guessed she was only about 3 months old. Then the nurse told me she was 1 years old and had been brought to the orphanage only a month earlier. Her mother had died in child birth and her father had neglected her. She came to the orphanage so malnutritioned she was almost died. Now she is small but growing quickly and eating solid food. I hope to volunteer at the orphanage as much as possible. I know those children will brighten my spirit after a tough day.

My village is in a good position but there is also a lot of work to be done there. The Ilembula primary school head master was very open about the problems her children face. She told us many of the kids in grade 5-7 are already sexually active and that 1-2 girls a year have to leave the school because they become pregnant. The nurse at the HIV testing clinic said she tests about 120 people a month and about 25 of them are HIV positive. That's a 21% positive testing rate. Really scary stuff! Devota and I have a lot of plans on how to lower the infection rate. Along with SRH and life skills classes in the schools, the Information Resource center inthe community, community seminars and sports league, I plan to start a women's craft group where young women can come and talk about issues they face and make a craft they can sell or use in their homes. We also want to start a water purification group in the community. There is another NGO in Iringa that has devised a way to get clean water with just an old 1 and 1/2 liter plastic water bottle, contaminated ground water, a tin roof and the sun. They had epidemiologists for the University of Chicago test the water and they found it was cleaner than any tap water they've tested in the US. The number 1 reason children miss school is because of stomach illness from contaminated water and one of the best ways for a person with HIV to stay healthy is by drinking clean water. I'm particularly excited about the water program because it's so simple but it has immediate results. This is the exact opposite of HIV prevention which can be a long, complicated process rife with cultural taboos and misinformation. There is so much work to be done in such a sort time but I know if we take small steps and inspire just a few young people we can make things better for the next generation of Igula children. I'm ready to inspire and to be inspired. I'm jumping head first into this project and it feels so exciting.