Top 10 Reasons to Quit Mefloquine*

10. CONSTANT ANXIETY
9. Nightmares about spiders
8. Waking up in the middle of the night certain there is a big spider somewhere on the outside of your mosquito net
7. Having to look under your bed before you go to sleep because you are worried a snake might have slithered in and be waiting for you under there (never mind that you’ve been assured it is VERY unusual to find snakes in town)
6. Waking up in the morning and your first thought is “Will there be a hole in my screen from where a snake came in?”
5. Reading that pilots shouldn’t take it because they need control of their fine motor skills. Oh, that explains why I’m bumping into things and terribly jumpy all the time
4. Did I mention anxiety?
3. Suspicion that your friends are being mean to you for no good reason
2. Nagging fears that because you are in Africa you will get some hideous disease
1. Oh my god is that a snake under my bed? No? Spiders? What, they’re just dust bunnies? Are you messing with me? What is this scratching? Didn’t I read about some African disease that starts with scratching? I can’t take this anymore…


*Mefloquine is a malaria preventative and treatment drug (a.k.a Lariam) that has a reputation for nasty side effects including anxiety and paranoia

The little things that make me happy

You know you’re living in another culture when things you’ve never really thought of before suddenly take on new meaning. We’ve been making small changes to our house in the last few months that are finally starting to make a difference. A few weeks ago I bought a “duvet” (synthetic filled, but still nice and warm) and I have been reveling in my “marshmallow bed.” It’s been quite chilly here (think Spring in Saskatoon, but with no insulated housing and open windows), so I am now very warm and cozy at night. Yesterday our hallway light was fixed after a month and half of being broken so that we can now see ourselves in the mirror at the end of it. Today we had mosquito screens installed on all the windows so that our house will be significantly less buggy. And finally, a friend brought me ice cream on a stick after lunch while I was feverishly trying to finish a funding proposal.

A duvet, a hallway light, window screens, and ice cream. While at home these things might be afterthoughts (well, a good duvet wouldn’t be), here they have put a big smile on my face and make me feel contented.

A normal day in Arusha (during the rainy season)

I get up about 7 am. Sometimes later if it’s rainy and grey. In my grogginess I realize that I must turn on the hot water heater if I want a warm shower later. I stumble into the kitchen and manage to get some granola and yogurt into a bowl. Shuffle to the living room and plunk down in a chair (stuffed red velour). Somewhere around the third bite I begin to wake up. I make coffee or have a glass of juice. It dawns on me that I’m going to be late if I don’t hurry up and get in the shower. I dump my dishes next to the sink and hurry to my room only to realize that my bed is not made and my mosquito net askew. I tidy up and hurry to the shower praying there’s enough water and I won’t have to yell to get my roommates to turn on the pump just when I’ve lathered shampoo in my hair.

Much time (and water) is wasted standing around in my towel letting the water run until it gets warm even though I’ve turned on the heater about 30 minutes before. I just can’t deal with a cold shower on dreary mornings. I get out of the shower realizing I only have about 15 minutes to get ready and out the door before I’m late. A flurry of getting ready and usually running about 10 minutes late, I dash out.

Negotiate the muddy road in front of the house and around the corner to where I can catch a daladala (public transportation – really a minibus that should only hold about 14 people, but up to 20 are often crammed in – more if there are kids). If I’m lucky I get a daladala with an empty seat. If not, I have to squish in contortions that leave me cramped after 10 or 15 minute ride in bumper-to-bumper traffic. If it’s really muddy or I can’t get a daladala with 14 people or less I say screw it and pay for a taxi. Daladalas cost the equivalent of about $0.20 and a taxi is about $2.50, so I go for the cheaper route as much as possible.

I get off the daladala about 2 blocks from work. I could get off closer, but I like walking for a bit in the mornings. Of course, I often have to negotiate the myriad of hawkers who want me to buy batiks, painted banana leaves, bracelets, or whatever always at a “volunteer price.” I’ve perfected the say-hi-in-passing-and-ignore-whatever-else-they-say routine. Even so, it’s still a nice walk. I go down a path through a beautiful green space and try to ignore the trash and occasional guy taking a pee break. Then I trundle up a hill and around the back of the building (it’s a short-cut). If I’ve timed it right everyone else is just leaving the daily morning prayer or mass so I don’t have to walk past the chapel window while everyone else is inside watching my heathen self saunter in (soooo glad I’m not Catholic – it’s hard enough to try and get there before 8:45am).

My office (double telephone booth) is really on the second floor, but in true holdover from the European colonialist style, the bottom floor is “ground” and the next one up is 1st. Whatever. I like my small space. There’s no room for anyone else to bug me, look over my shoulder or crowd me while I type, or go in after and change what I’ve done. I’m the only one with keys to my office. Well, I guess that’s not true. Sister Wenceslaus has an extra key just in case (yes, really, like “Good King Wenceslaus”). Her office takes up most of the rest of the room that my old storage space (office) is in. She does the accounting, so I trust her. The annoyances of working in a shared space in a different office on a computer that has been described as “a bomb that should be sent to Osama Bin Laden to blow up” were all part of the first month or so after I started work. So now I have some privacy and things are starting to happen.

Despite my much-treasured solitary space, I get a lot of visitors and the occasional yell from my boss, Sister Agreda, to come see her. There’s no such thing as a phone at every desk. In fact, there’s only one phone for the whole floor. I guess the fax machine counts too – but it’s right next to the phone. I’m now the resident English expert, so everyone in the building asks me to double-check their work or edit their newsletter. I usually can fit in my own work too. Sometimes I sit in the reception/registration room visiting with clients. On occasion I will go to the counseling rooms to see how things are going, but I don’t like to invade other people’s privacy. We don’t really offer too much anonymity to clients, but it’s not because we don’t want to. The current system set up is to assign each client a number that they have to use when they come in so we can find their file (student exercise books). Most people have trouble remembering their number, so our backup is to use their name. The counselor who is in charge wants to change the system, but we need more money to do it. She needs a computer and software. That goes on my list of things to find money for. It is telling that a large portion of the clients we, a Catholic organization, serve are Muslims. Tanzania has about a 30-30-30 divide among Christians, Muslims, and Animist or Tribal religions. The Catholics probably all know each other and HIV is such a private issue, especially considering the high levels of stigma here, so it’s not surprising that “outsiders” find us a safe place.

I’m lucky that my job serves lunch. Apparently they didn’t always. People would go out for lunch and often not return to work, so the Archbishop announced that he would feed everyone on-site and that seemed to solve the problem. Every Monday, Wednesday, Friday we get rice with beans, peas, or meat and Tuesday, Thursday is ugali with meat sauce. Ugali is like a thick (almost solid) corn meal porridge. It’s utterly flavorless on its own, but soaks up the flavor of whatever you put with it. Tanzanians eat it with their hands. I’ve tried, but it’s too hot and messy. I prefer a utensil. We’ve only been served meat in the last week and a half. There was a Rift Valley Fever outbreak when I got here, so everything was vegetarian. I thought I would be happy to see meat, but they use EVERY PART OF THE COW. Including tubes of some sort. Eww. It’s also quite tough and stringy sometimes. I’m not a fan. Vegetarian is ok with me. I’ve taken to bringing floss to work for use after eating meat.

Lunch is at 1pm, so that makes the rest of the day go by very quickly. Closing down time is 4pm and sometimes I would like to stay later to finish something, but they lock the front doors soon after, so I have to leave or sleep there. I go home. The heavy rains are all at night, so by afternoon the day is usually very nice. I walk home. It takes about 35-40 minutes and it’s usually a very nice walk. The only thing I don’t like is the black exhaust that comes out of at least half the cars and trucks on the road. I know North America pollutes way more than Africa, but that diesel has to account for something.

If I don’t have to stop at the market or run any other errands, I get home around 5pm and usually crash for a bit. Sometimes I go for a walk or a jog (who am I kidding, I’ve gone jogging once). I start thinking about what to make for dinner about 6 or so. We cook on our gas tank with a burner attached or the electric stove. The stove takes a long time to heat up and it is difficult to control the heat, so we use the gas more often. Both of my roommates are vegetarians, so we really only eat meat if someone is feeling a lack of protein. A plethora of vegetables are available and among the three of us, we have a lot of cooking ideas. Never using a microwave is growing on me.

We have fallen into the habit of watching TV shows on DVD on the computer during dinner. We’ve seen almost all of the Sex & the City episodes at least twice and we’re all currently addicted to another HBO series called Entourage. It’s awesome. If anybody wants to send me things, send me tv shows on a DVD. We love them!!

It’s a tossup who does the dishes – usually the person who didn’t cook. Then I’m usually totally beat and I check my email (or write a blog entry like today) and I crash.

Tuck in my mosquito net and good night.

Update – finally!

I didn’t fall off the planet. I’ve just been trying to get in the groove here and it’s tiring me out. Things are starting to take shape. I have internet at home finally and it is so worth it, even though it costs a pile of money. There are three of us in our house now, so it’s not so bad – we all share the cost.

Work is both very rewarding and emotionally draining sometimes. I have been able to finagle an office that has been described as a telephone booth. Maybe it’s the size of 2 telephone booths stuck together. It was an old storage space. I can’t fully extend my arms in either direction, but it’s enough room for a mini computer desk, a chair and hopefully a printer is coming soon. They’ve hooked up internet for me at work too, and I’ve been cranking things out. I’ve submitted 4 funding applications and have 2 more currently in the works. One of the applications was the first step of a 2-step process. It is a big money fund provided by a bunch of international donors including CIDA and USAID. I applied for 2 different projects and I just found out that both applications have been selected to submit full proposals. Yay!! It’s a small step, but it sure feels good to have even minimal success.

I am also grateful to my priest from Wyoming, David Duprey and his organization Kata Loukan who have sent us a package of medication and other supplies they had on hand. We’re still waiting for the package to arrive, but I’m sure it will be here soon. Every little bit helps, and I feel like I’m doing something worthwhile when things happen.

The hard part about work is the clients who come in. It is devastating to see what HIV is doing to people and families. I went on one home visit to a woman who was in the final stages of AIDS. She had 2 children, one about 6 or 7 years and the other about 2 years. The father had never been involved. She had severe thrush in her throat and was unable to eat or even speak much. She was also suffering severely from vaginal infections. She was just a pile of bones, really. We gave her some medications, but she died about a week later anyway. I have no idea what has happened to her children. When we were there, her sister shooed the children out of the room and the older one picked up the younger one and I could imagine that might be the future of both of them – children raising themselves. It was awful.

These heart-wrenching stories come to our office everyday and it really is hard to deal with. Just last week a month-and-a-half old baby girl was given to one of our staff members to take to an orphanage because her mother was dying of AIDS and literally going insane, and the mother’s relatives also had HIV and were unable to care for the baby. The baby is too young now to test, but if her mother was that sick, it is likely the child is too. It’s devastating.

I think that’s why I haven’t had much energy to update on a more regular basis. I get home and I’m just exhausted.

I took a bit of a break over the Easter holidays. I guess working for the Catholics has its benefits on holy days. I got the Thursday off before Good Friday and didn’t have to be back until the next Thursday. Before the third cooperant arrived, the two of us who arrived together went to Zanzibar for a few days. It was hot, but beautiful. It’s the most beautiful ocean I’ve seen. I’m posting some pictures. I got a really terrible sunburn from snorkeling, but other than that it was a very nice rest.

In general, it’s just taking me some time to adjust to everything. All my previous travels were only for relatively short spurts. It’s so much easier to deal with annoyances when you know you’re going home in a couple of months. Contemplating the next two years of annoyances gives them a different dimension. One of our big problems was the security guard at our “compound.” Soon after we arrived we noticed that he seemed to drink. A lot. Soon, he was drunk from morning till night. He had been asking us for money to repair a lot of the tools he used for gardening, and we found out later that he was giving us inflated prices and drinking away the difference. This made me really angry for 2 reasons. First, I really doubted that he was earning much money as a security guard. I knew that he had a family that he was supporting with his income. His wife was at home raising his children and he was drinking away any extra support he could have given them. What a jerk! Second, he is tiny man who I could knock down if I blew on him. How could he possibly provide us any protection when he can’t even make a coherent sentence? Thankfully after a lot of complaining, the landlord has sacked him and replaced him with reputable service from a security company.

Even though I feel better about my own security (and because we had a big lock installed on our door), I can’t say that I feel good about what happened. That guy had been working in our compound for years. I don’t know what will happen to him – can he find another job? What will happen to his family? Then there’s the whole issue of the need to rely on private security because police really can’t (or don’t) keep a lid on crime. And really, can you blame people who are fighting to survive for seeing an easy solution by stealing from those who, in comparison, seem to have unlimited wealth?

Although our house is (now) secure, and our area is fairly nice we’ve been warned numerous times from a bunch of different people that we shouldn’t be walking around after dark (which is 7pm). It’s just not safe. That is hard to deal with. I’m starting to get cabin fever. It’s not like we can’t go ANYWHERE, it’s just that we have to call a cab if we want to go somewhere. No evening walks, no seeing how things are at night first hand. It’s frustrating.

Of course there are the little moments of amusement that help to keep things from being too deep and heavy. For example, seeing a guy carry about 30 empty 5-gallon yellow plastic cooking oil drums on his head (and spread out next to his body). And there was a daladala (public transportation – kind of like mini-vans) that had a plastic blow-up seagull hanging from the rearview mirror. It was bobbing around while we drove. And one restaurant menu had a description of a fish burger that included “it has that great fishy taste.” It had sounded so good up until that moment.

So, that’s all for now. I’ll be writing more often, so I don’t end up with such long posts in the future.