Life in General or Something Like It

I’ve received a fair number of e-mails asking about what it’s like to live in Africa. Everything from what I eat and drink to questions about who I work with and where I work. I’ll try to answer some of the most frequent questions, but do feel free to pose others either via e-mail or leaving a comment on my blog and I’ll do my best to answer them.

I live about a 15-20 minute walk away from MacKay House, which is where the Diocesan offices are located. I just found out a few days ago that when Miriam leaves Dodoma to head home to New Zealand that I will be moving from my current apartment on the CAMS upper compound to her apartment on the CAMS lower compound. That might take a few minutes off of my morning commute, but it means that Sarah and I won’t be on the same compound anymore. I don’t need to think about that for another month, thankfully. There are a few ways to walk to the office from our compound. One way is to walk along the sealed road in the direction of the train station and then walk another two blocks to the left, cross the train tracks and walk past the Anglican Cathedral. We started out doing that walk all the time until we were introduced to the back way, which is more scenic I suppose and there are fewer cars. The roads are all dirt until you get near the train tracks again and the roads are sealed again. It’s a little faster to walk the back way and when we leave at just the right time we tend to get to one of the larger roads at the same time that a guard with a large gun is escorting three un-handcuffed prisoners in bright orange jumpsuits down the road, so really it’s a win-win situation. :-)

The Carpenter’s Kids office is on the 3rd floor of MacKay House between the Tunajali HIV/AIDS program office and Magi Griffin’s office. Magi is from the Diocese of Atlanta and is the Bishop’s Special Advisor on the MDGs. I think that’s her title anyway. She does a lot and she’s just great! We’re just down the hall from Bishop Mhogolo’s office, but I haven’t seen him in the office yet. He travels all over the diocese, so that’s not really too surprising.

The Carpenter’s Kids staff is made up of some of the kindest, most dedicated people I have ever met. I feel truly fortunate to work with them. I’ll only give a brief description of what everyone does, and believe me, it won’t do the work they do justice, but I could write a separate posting about the CK staff.
Pastor Noah is the Program Director and in addition to that job, he is also the priest of the Chadulu parish here in Dodoma, which is linked with St. Martha’s Church in the Bronx, and manages the Furaha Hostel for the diocese. Needless to say, he is a busy man.
Our Assistant Director is John Mattaya. He used to work for DCT Print, but has worked for The Carpenter’s Kids for awhile now. He’s quite the joker.
Our Program Administrator is Mmoti Sudayi, who, along with Noel Chomola, our Assistant Program Administrator, manages all of the DCT parishes who are part of The Carpenter’s Kids program. The two of them are so busy all the time, riding out to parishes on motorcycles to take pictures and measurements for uniforms, helping children who come to the office when they’re sick. The list goes on.
Daudi Mheta is our Communications Coordinator. He works with all of the parish communications coordinators to make sure that they can post messages to their linked parish in the US. He also helps kids when they come to the office to get medical attention.
Willy Saimoni is our shoe fundi, or shoe expert. He has the very important job of ensuring that all of the kids in the program have a good pair of shoes that fit their feet. He takes the measurements that Mmoti and Noel get and finds each child a pair of shoes. He also helps get other items for the kids, like socks and soap. During the New York pilgrimages, he helped by the gifts that people gave to their linked parishes. He’s also our resident comedian and keeps the mood light in the office.
John Joseph is the official driver for the Carpenter’s Kids program. He drives the screening panel to and from villages most weeks and is definitely someone you want behind the wheel when you’re driving out to remote parishes. Like all of the guys on staff, he has a great sense of humor and when he, Willy, John, Noel and Daudi get together hilarity tends to ensue. There is a lot of laughter in our office!
Stanley Magembe is our staff accountant. I don’t know him very well yet because he is only in the office for two days a week and is usually at a computer working with accounting software, but he is very nice.

Miriam Plume has been the Program Coordinator for the past two years. I can’t even begin to list everything that she does, but she’s been the one who has coordinated the logistics for all of the large visits to Dodoma from the EDNY, she writes the monthly newsletters, the quarterly reports, the annual reports, monitors online communications between parishes, etc. It’s amazing. Her last day in the office is Thursday, September 11th and we will really miss her. She’s heading home to New Zealand to work for New Zealand Aid (similar to USAID) and will, I’m sure, do amazing work there.

Callum Thirkell, Sarah Dailey and I are the newest members of the Carpenter’s Kids team. Callum is 27 years old and is from New Zealand. He and his wife Laura, who teaches at Canon Andrea Mwaka School (CAMS for short), are friends of Miriam’s and will be here for a year or two. Callum is going to be working on developing the healthcare component of the program that we are hoping to launch soon. Sarah is 22 years old (her birthday was August 22nd) and she is our resident communications guru. She just graduated from UGA with a degree in Interior Design, which she has already put to great use here by rearranging our office and painting the logo on the wall and door. It looks amazing! A main component of her job will be to take over the newsletters and reports aspect of Miriam’s job. Sarah created a new layout for the monthly newsletters that we will be debuting soon, so keep your eyes open for that!

The final member of our team is Brian Atkins. Brian is officially the Business Partner for the Diocese of Central Tanganyika, but does lots of work with The Carpenter’s Kids. He lives in England, but travels to Tanzania regularly. I haven’t yet met him, but am looking forward to doing so in October when he arrives to spend 8 weeks here.

That’s a brief description of our team, so hopefully that will help you all keep track of people when I mention them in posts.

So, I guess it would be good to go on to the more mundane things: eating, drinking, etc. Food here is great. We haven’t really experimented with too much yet, but so far I’ve liked everything I’ve tried except the liver jerky I was given in one of the villages. Sorry if there are any liver fans reading this. I would say the thing that I’ve eaten the most since I arrived is rice. Lots and lots of it. I think I eat rice almost every day during the work week because we go out to lunch every day. According to Noel, one of the guys I work with, Tanzanians don’t bring lunch to work, so we always go out. The place Sarah and I tend to go the most is called Rose’s Cafe which is an Indian cafe located about a block from the Carpenter’s Kids office. Rose is really nice and tends to tease us if we order the same thing for more than 3 days in a row. That isn’t hard to do as the menu isn’t really varied – there’s beef curry, chicken curry, beef masala, chicken masala, a fish dish and a vegetarian dish most days and on Friday’s Rose makes several different kinds of biryani – but you do get a lot of food for not a lot of money. The beef curry, for example, is only 1,500 shillings or just over a dollar. The most expensive thing on the menu is usually the vegetarian dish of the day and the chicken masala which both run in the 4,500 shilling range, or about $4.

We also go to a place called ‘Nice & Easy’ for lunch sometimes. Their menu is similar in make up. You can get beef, chicken, fish or njegere with your choice of either rice, ugali or something else. I can’t remember what. My personal favorite is njegere which is a vegetarian dish made up of tomato, peas, carrots, onions, powdered coconut milk and some spices (curry and something else). Njegere and rice costs 1,500 shillings, while a chicken dish tends to run about 3,500 shillings. We always get passion fruit juice when we’re at Nice & Easy, as opposed to the ever present soda that we drink most other places.

There’s a very large outdoor (well, really under a canopy-like cover) market that sells fruit, vegetables and spices. I personally find it to be more than a little claustrophobic and so I don’t like to go there too often. There are also two ‘Western’ style grocery stores here – one is called Super Dealer and the other Two Sisters. They are both run by people of Indian descent who speak English and Swahili very well. This is where you can find all sorts of imported goods – usually from South Africa. Each store has a large freezer section where they keep meat (ground beef, sausage, hot dogs, chicken, fish fillets, etc) as well as butter and cheese. I’m not entirely sure where the meat comes from, but the cheese is from New Zealand and Ireland. Some of my Kiwi friends said that they can buy New Zealand cheese here for almost the exact same price as they could back in New Zealand.

You can also buy cereal, crackers, cookies, baking supplies, pasta, different kinds of fruit juice, ice cream, tea, coffee, cleaning supplies, toilet paper and liquor. Some things are not too expensive, while others are really expensive. For example, my favorite brand of fruit juice, Ceres, which is from South Africa, costs about 2,500 shillings which I think makes it cheaper here than it was back in the US. Cereal, on the other hand, costs 12,000 shillings for a medium size box – that’s about $10. Cereal is marginally cheaper in Dar es Salaam, but we don’t go there often.

So, to answer the ‘what do you drink’ question: I drink lots of water when I’m at home. In order to be able to drink the water here, I have to boil it at a rolling boil for a few minutes, let it cool and then pour it into a counter-top filter. The filter is a large two-part metal container. You pour the boiled water into the top half and there’s a stone cylinder that the water gets filtered through one drop at a time into the bottom half of the container. I’m not entirely sure what the stone is, but it looks kind of like limestone to me. Bottled water is also readily available here and sometimes if Sarah and I don’t feel like boiling water to refill our water bottles, we just buy 1.5 liter bottles at the store. Lazy, yes, but effective... I also tend to drink about 2-3 liters of fruit juice each week. When we go out to lunch I usually drink orange Fanta or ginger beer, which is great, but usually I drink Fanta. Sarah laughs at me sometimes because I always order Fanta and not Coca Cola or Sprite, but what can you do? When we were in villages with the New York group, almost all of the Carpenter’s Kids drank Fanta so if it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for me. I also drink tea (grown in Tanzania) and hot chocolate (the mix is imported from South Africa) at home fairly regularly. I have tried coffee here, and it’s good but I don’t drink it regularly.

I guess that takes care of the food and drink questions. In terms of other things, you can find lots of items that are similar to what you’d find in the US. The quality might not be as good with some things, but that’s the case in the US as well. You just have to be patient and willing to go to three stores to get what you’re looking for instead of trying to get everything in one place. People are definitely willing to help you as well. When Sarah, Noel and I were looking for a can of blue paint last week, the owner of one store called down to another store and had some blue paint brought over. It’s a different rhythm, but you get used to it.

I promised myself that this was not going to be another long post, but apparently I don’t know how to write anything but long posts. I’ll stop writing for now even though I can think of lots of other things to tell, but in closing I would say that it’s definitely a different experience living here, but it’s been great so far. I know I’ve written this multiple times, but the people here are incredibly wonderful and as with anywhere else I’ve been, the people are what make the place interesting and worthwhile. That is definitely the case here in Tanzania.