"When is reproduction? Does that come after coordination?"
--Dan Stamp, PCV, inquiring about the biology syllabus

"It helps, but it isn't necessary."
--Anne Fristad, PCV, responding to Dan's question.

Hello friends,

A little bit of mirth to start you out with today. I hope the past month has brought warmth and sunshine for you all up there in the northern hemisphere. Here, it's getting increasingly cooler and I've taken to wearing heavy shirts in the evenings... of course, when I travel outside of Monduli, even to Arusha, that's not necessary. A little altitude makes a whole lot of difference!

I'm relaxing a little today because tomorrow (Monday the 26th) is my birthday... and as luck would have it, it's also a national holiday! (It's the day in 1964 when Tanganyika and Zanzibar united to form Tanzania) However, the rest of the week should be quite busy; I'll be going to a science teacher's conference in Arusha on Tuesday and Wednesday, then back to Monduli, then back to Arusha on Thursday night for a Friday Peace Corps seminar. I might get to teach one day this week. Argh.

Missing classes this week is doubly frustrating because I didn't teach all last week, either. I was recovering from Africa's favorite potentially fatal disease, Malaria (which is saying a lot, since there are oh-so-many potentially fatal diseases here.)

Anyway, spent most of last Saturday and Sunday with a 101-102+ fever and all the standard chills, weakness, muscle fatigue, accelerated heart rate, nausea, vomiting, congested head and chest, and inability to stand up for more than a few seconds. Feeling better now, but it took quite a while to get my strength back, not to mention my appetite.

Speaking of appetite, I did shed a few pounds during my illness... but I've lost much more since the beginning of my time here... since arriving here in October, I've now shed almost 30 pounds, and I'm down to a weight I haven't seen since 1994 or so. Those of you who saw me right before I left knew I had it to lose, but I still think I ought to be getting a little more exercise than I am for this kind of weight loss.

But despite the weakness and loss of appetite from the malaria, I'm generally in good spirits. Had a chance to catch up with my reading... though I'll say, for the first time, I really missed TV. Something about staying home sick from school just doesn't seem right unless I'm watching Bob Barker do the Showcase Showdown, or at least some production of the Children's Television Workshop.

Since Monduli really doesn't have any mosquitoes to speak of, I'm pretty sure I picked up the malaria two weeks ago when I was in Machame for the regional Peace Corps Girls' Education Conference. There had been one in Tanga region last year that had been very successful, and most teachers in other regions were trying to get on the ball to get one going for their own regions.

The Peace Corps teachers in Arusha and Kilimanjaro regions (there are 8-10 of us) got together in February to discuss the idea of a Girls' workshop, and after a few planning meetings in March, we held it April 9, 10, and 11 at Machame Girls' Secondary School, where one of our volunteers teaches. It's a quaint little site about a mile up Mt. Kilimanjaro, featuring a beautiful view of the main peak. Each volunteer brought four girl students and a Tanzanian woman teacher from their respective schools. This may not sound like much, but it came out to over fifty people involved with the conference.

We met on Friday night and played some get-to-know-you and confidence/trust-building games while waiting for everybody to arrive. To make the girls more at ease, as much of the conference was done in Swahili as possible. This made some of the games quite interesting for the teachers: Many of the UU folks on this list have played the game "I Like" or "All my Friends and Neighbors" where you sit in a circle with one fewer chairs than there are people. Then the standing person says something like "I like all my friends and neighbors who..." and then names some characteristic many people present might have, such as "who are wearing socks," or "who traveled more than three hours to get here," etc. Then all those people get up and run to another seat, one person is left standing, and it starts over again. You can imagine playing this game in my non-native language presented a challenge!

On Saturday, there were two workshops. In the morning we had a panel of six Tanzanian professional women from various careers (nursing, teaching, women's advocacy, business, engineering, and batik making). They introduced themselves briefly by describing who they were and how they got to be doing what they do for a living, and any challenges they faced getting there. Then the floor was opened up for questions. Many students and teachers had very good and very personal questions, many of them giving testament to the challenges and pressures they've faced.

In the afternoon, there was a second similar workshop, this one with fewer people (3) on the panel. The topic was AIDS and sexual health. I don't know too many details about how this one went, because the male PC teachers agreed that our presence for that discussion might make some of the girls uncomfortable and consequently hinder the question-and-answer process. I'm told, though, by both the women volunteers and my own students that it went very well, and that there was both a great diversity of experiences and questions asked, since we had some girls from very urban schools, and some from very rural ones.

In the evening, after supper, there was a closing circle where we lit candles and everybody shared what they were most thankful for about the weekend. Then there was a dance where the girls cut loose for a while and danced the night away. That was that last official event of the conference; on Sunday, we got up, had a little breakfast, and got on buses for the long ride home (for myself and my girls, it was about four hours, for others it was more than eight!)

The conference was followed up by each Volunteer with his/her students to ensure sustainability, such that experiences of the few students who went would roll over to the other girls at each school. We haven't fully decided what to do yet at my school (and I've been a little out of commission recently!) but my students were talking about putting on a skit for the other girls.

On a similar note, more than a few people have asked me about gender dynamics in Tanzanian society. I have to say first that all I can give, both now and probably in the future, are surface impressions. I am not a Tanzanian and cannot possibly hope to understand how or why being raised in this kind of society results in the kinds of gender roles that it does; I have a hard enough time doing the same thing about my own American society.

I guess the best way to start out is just to give some overviews of some immediately visible differences and similarities between here and the states.

First, Tanzania is a much more 'traditional' society than the United States. Women are only now just starting to move out into the work force. Inevitably, they are facing the same problems American women faced a few decades ago (and still face today to a lesser extent.)

We'll take the example of the host family with whom I lived during training: There is a mother, father, four brothers, and two sisters. The entire time I lived there, I did not once cook, clean, wash clothes, or do anything even remotely domestic. Neither did any of my brothers, even though some of them were done with school and had no jobs. The two sisters and the mother do all the cooking, cleaning, sweeping, washing, etc. for the entire family. I was chastised a little the few times I tried to help out. The trick was, I couldn't tell exactly what I was not supposed to do because I was a guest, or because I was a man. Still tricky to call that one.

In any case, mine is a pretty standard Tanzanian family. The girls (women, really -- they're 19 and 21) have finished their education (I think both of them left O-Level about halfway through it) and now live at home, where they will live until they get married and move in with their husbands. (I always thought it would be difficult to meet men, though, when they stay home all day and do housework.)

The boys/men on the other hand, will also continue to live at home until they get jobs. It's actually likely that they will continue to live at home even after they get a job... and not move out until they have enough money to get married and have families of their own. As a side note, many Tanzanians think it's appalling that Americans have this tradition of kicking their kids out of the house as soon as they finish high school, and are even more bewildered by the fact that the children would choose to live on their own even when it's to their economic disadvantage. It shows how much more important family is here.

In any case, this expectation that the women/girls will do all the housework adversely affects their education in a number of ways. The most obvious, of course is that if a woman expects to get married and do housework for the rest of her life, why should she bother with an education? (Education, I might add, is very expensive for some. As I mentioned in an earlier message, secondary school is not free, and for some families, impossible to afford.)

So for parents who are encouraging their children in school, they see putting girls through school as a waste of time and money. Money, for obvious reasons; time, as in time that they could be at home taking care of the housework.

On the other hand, the girls are still expected to do all the housework, even while they are in school... this means for a student not at a boarding school, she comes home and instead of having time to study, has to cook, clean, wash, etc. She's usually too exhausted to study, I'd wager. When someone needs to stay home to take care of something at home, there's no hesitation about keeping the girl home from school. The boys, however, have all the time in the world to study, do homework, etc. because they're sitting around all evening.

So as you can see, it's not easy to break the stereotype. A girl would have to be really intelligent, hard working, and determined to defeat these odds. However, there are some exceptions... and let me just say that being in Tanzania has completely changed my opinion on single-sex schooling. My school is Co-Ed. My girls, even in A-Level, are shy, quiet, and not very confident in much. They almost never play sports, and don't do many other extra-curriculars.

My PC friend Brandon teaches the same subject and level as I do, but at an all-girls school in Moshi. Whenever I visit him, I'm amazed at the difference. His girls are boisterous, self-confident, and higher-achieving than my girls. They play basketball with him and give him a good run for his money (they'd probably whup me into the ground!) They're active and good in all sports, perform better academically, and have much lower dropout rates. The difference is simply staggering.

This is one of the reasons why Peace Corps teachers do things like all-girl conferences. So girls from my school can get together with girls like the ones from Brandon's school and see the kind of confidence it's possible for them to have; the kinds of things they can achieve.

What's interesting about the whole girls' education thing is that while the general culture may be largely discouraging, the education infrastructure is not. When results came back from the terminal exams for Forms 1, 2, and 3, we (the staff at my school) had to decide what mark was a "passing" mark, to go on to the next form. When we discovered that raising the pass mark to the level we wanted would end up cutting 8 girls and no boys, we decided to leave it where it was, and keep the girls in school.

This attitude is pretty common among school administrations, making sure to encourage girls to stay in school and advance their education. When I visited the Technical College in Arusha, I saw all kinds of posters hanging up promoting women's education, especially education in science and engineering, and other traditionally "male" occupations and disciplines.

On the other hand, while the Ministry of Education may be working on one tack, the Parliament hasn't seemed to have gotten the idea yet. Women here are still largely treated as second-class citizens in both subtle and non-subtle ways.

When I first got here in October, I read a newspaper article about some recent debates in Parliament. One of them was a proposal from a woman MP to make the penalty for rape more severe. Currently, the maximum penalty was something like 20 years in prison; she wanted to up it to a potential life sentence. It was overwhelmingly voted down, because, as none other than the Speaker-of-the-House equivalent so eloquently put it, "You can't punish a man for following his natural instincts... if a man sees a beautiful woman, he simply can't help himself. You can't put him in prison for life just for doing what comes naturally."

While this mode of thinking is still largely implicit in some aspects of American culture, I simply can't fathom the American Speaker of the House saying something like that, officially, on the House floor.

On the other hand, the same article told about a discussion in Parliament on homosexuality (which is completely illegal here) in which everyone seemed to agree that it was an abomination (especially lesbianism) and that the penalties should be as stiff as the constitution would allow. Even the women MPs denounced this "crime against humanity, and against God's law".

So that's the status of women's legal rights here; rape is a "natural, instinctual" thing, but lesbianism is a "crime against humanity." And there we are.

It's quite difficult for me to even talk about this, since it's so far outside of anything I can possibly understand... but female "circumcision", known more appropriately as genital mutilation, it still extremely prevalent here, especially anywhere outside a major city. Because of the number and diversity of people on this list, I'll not go into graphic detail, but the process involves the ritual cutting away of all of the external female genitalia about the time puberty is beginning, and then "sewing up" the "wound" leaving room for urination and little else.

The process is completely ritualized, of course, part of most tribal traditions. I don't know about many different traditions, but I have learned a bit about the Maasai tradition, which are likely similar to others. There is a similar tradition for the boys, which happens around age 13-18, whenever they are ready to take their first wife. However, male circumcision here involves the same parts here as it does in the West, just occurs later in life. While this tradition is completely unnecessary (just like in the West) it does not render the man sexually dysfunctional, as the female tradition does.

Part of the female Maasai tradition is a whole drama on the "big day" in which the girl is "kidnapped" away from her group of younger girl friends by the women in the village. The ceremony is then performed, and the girl is instructed very strongly not to cry, because "everyone will make fun" of her. The girl is usually half-unconscious by the end of the ordeal, because of trying not to cry from the intense pain.

This tradition leads to other severe problems later in life. Obviously, the girl/woman's first sexual encounter is inevitably very painful. Also, because of the scarring, childbirth is incredibly difficult (that is, even more so than usual) and many women die as the result of blood loss or later infection. Therefore, most women starve themselves starting about the seventh month of pregnancy, so that the baby will be small when born and do minimal damage. This leads to a lot of infant death, illness, and malformation due to low birth weight.

Fortunately, in recent years, people in the cities with more income and better education have stopped this practice in their families. It is officially illegal (not that that means much here) and people in the cities are beginning to refer to it as mutilation and not as circumcision.

I'm sorry if this is difficult to read, and you may feel that it's unnecessary for me to describe this practice in this way. However, I'm sharing it because this process has happened to many of the women I work with, most of the students, and almost all of the women/girls I see in Monduli outside the school. More than a few of my own girl students have talked about it (when the subject came up regarding the male tradition) and staunchly defended it as right and proper. An attack on this tradition is a culturally insensitive attack on their way of life and in fact, on their own bodies.

I am surrounded by this. It may be hard to understand, but it's here and it's real.

Another thing that's also (fortunately) here and real is food. The rains have been here long enough that people are starting to be able to produce food again. The corn is still a long way off from being ready, but the bananas are getting ripe and the beans will be ready soon. The onions, which recently have been smaller than golf balls, are starting to increase in size again, and the next papaya season begins in a few weeks.

It's really nice to see things growing here -- and green! When I arrived here, and through January, everything was brown and dead as far as the eye could see... a very stereotypical bush village. Now things are lush, and green, and everything's growing. Including the grass in my front yard, which I've had to cut a few times... there are no lawn mowers here, of course, so grass is cut by using a long, bent machete; kind of like a small scythe, but not quite as effective. It's good to work the land, even just a little.

Nothing else to report this time around... I hope spring is in swing and that summer arrives well for you all. Take care.

Tembea na usalama,
(Walk with Peace,)
Ethan

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