Thursday, January 27, 2005
I’m not sure I like this new year. I am doing what I don’t want to do --- writing stuff on the blackboard for students to copy without thinking. Today I began my best class by asking them “What is a mineral.” The answer – “The crystalline part of rocks” – was in the FIRST SENTENCE I put on the board in our last period. Even when I told them where it was in their notes, they could not come up with that simple answer. On top of that, they were rather unruly. I just lost it, and really blew up at them. That did not help either them or me.
The first class of the day had been a washout. It was a dark and gloomy day. There was no electricity in the classroom – you literally could not see any writing on the blackboard, much less see to take notes. My emergency fallback, the laboratory, didn’t have electricity either. I took the class over to the Dining Hall. They did have electricity there, but the blackboards were so bad that you couldn’t read what I wrote on them. So we talked in generalities about the history of metals (The Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, etc). Then the rain started pounding on the steel roof so hard that you couldn’t hear, either. End of class. Shudda stood in bed!
On the other hand, I just heard today that the Peace Corps has APPROVED the funding request for my Economic Empowerment project. And while I was in Dar es Salaam over the weekend, I met with Atiba from the NGO that is supporting me (TechnoServe), and he wants to come out to Mwanza to meet people and talk to the schools involved, maybe as early as Tuesday of next week! Now we will have to get our ten instructors fired up to go to Iringa for a week’s training course about the end of February. That will be a two-day bus ride, each way. Maybe we can break it up though, and spend the night in Arusha on the way. That would make it a lot easier.
So I guess you win one and you lose one. I find that I care less and less about the teaching. I want to do a good job, but it does not feel like something that makes a difference, and the system is so constraining that I don’t feel like I have any freedom of action.
Reading the newspapers in Dar, I came up with a new perspective on the opposition to condoms. With my friends, I’d always simply laid it to Evil Religious Fanatics (condoms encourage sex, condoms have holes in them, condoms can’t stop the AIDS virus, condoms are only sold to make money for imperialists, the Bible doesn’t allow condoms, etc). But this article was talking about the strength of traditional village culture, and the submersion of the individual in the community with the trust and faith that goes with that.
The article took as an example the changing official Ugandan Anti-AIDS campaign, from the original “Be Faithful” to “Love Carefully” and then, finally, to “Use a Condom Every Time to Prevent AIDS.” The authors see this as a breakdown in trust, from trusting your partner implicitly to caution and, finally, to every individual for him/herself and don’t trust ANYONE, even your most intimate partner. “Instead of addressing how Africans can rebuild trust, the West has promoted condoms.” Condomization!
But what then? The authors call for a holistic approach to combating AIDS – poverty reduction, education, public health and wellness training, and a return to traditional African values and morality, with condoms as only one part of that. Interestingly, one author compares AIDS in Africa to obesity and diabetes in the US: “The latter is seen as diseases of excess in a land of unjust excess, while AIDS is a disease of deficiency in a land of unjust deficiency, and both diseases hit the poor preferentially.”
I’m not sure what I make of all this, but it is surely interesting to consider. Of course, these sacred “African Village Values” are pretty much destroyed anyway by now – Africans would claim by the Dreaded Colonialists.
Incidentally, in Dar it turned out that the Radiologist who did my ultrasound was Guatemalan. He agreed with me in the similarity of Tz and Guate climates, but was much less willing to see cultural similarities, apart from things resulting from the level of poverty. And Guate has too many guns. But he readily agreed that there is a much higher energy level in Central America, when compared to Africa. Interesting to get that confirmation of my initial impressions.
The first class of the day had been a washout. It was a dark and gloomy day. There was no electricity in the classroom – you literally could not see any writing on the blackboard, much less see to take notes. My emergency fallback, the laboratory, didn’t have electricity either. I took the class over to the Dining Hall. They did have electricity there, but the blackboards were so bad that you couldn’t read what I wrote on them. So we talked in generalities about the history of metals (The Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, etc). Then the rain started pounding on the steel roof so hard that you couldn’t hear, either. End of class. Shudda stood in bed!
On the other hand, I just heard today that the Peace Corps has APPROVED the funding request for my Economic Empowerment project. And while I was in Dar es Salaam over the weekend, I met with Atiba from the NGO that is supporting me (TechnoServe), and he wants to come out to Mwanza to meet people and talk to the schools involved, maybe as early as Tuesday of next week! Now we will have to get our ten instructors fired up to go to Iringa for a week’s training course about the end of February. That will be a two-day bus ride, each way. Maybe we can break it up though, and spend the night in Arusha on the way. That would make it a lot easier.
So I guess you win one and you lose one. I find that I care less and less about the teaching. I want to do a good job, but it does not feel like something that makes a difference, and the system is so constraining that I don’t feel like I have any freedom of action.
Reading the newspapers in Dar, I came up with a new perspective on the opposition to condoms. With my friends, I’d always simply laid it to Evil Religious Fanatics (condoms encourage sex, condoms have holes in them, condoms can’t stop the AIDS virus, condoms are only sold to make money for imperialists, the Bible doesn’t allow condoms, etc). But this article was talking about the strength of traditional village culture, and the submersion of the individual in the community with the trust and faith that goes with that.
The article took as an example the changing official Ugandan Anti-AIDS campaign, from the original “Be Faithful” to “Love Carefully” and then, finally, to “Use a Condom Every Time to Prevent AIDS.” The authors see this as a breakdown in trust, from trusting your partner implicitly to caution and, finally, to every individual for him/herself and don’t trust ANYONE, even your most intimate partner. “Instead of addressing how Africans can rebuild trust, the West has promoted condoms.” Condomization!
But what then? The authors call for a holistic approach to combating AIDS – poverty reduction, education, public health and wellness training, and a return to traditional African values and morality, with condoms as only one part of that. Interestingly, one author compares AIDS in Africa to obesity and diabetes in the US: “The latter is seen as diseases of excess in a land of unjust excess, while AIDS is a disease of deficiency in a land of unjust deficiency, and both diseases hit the poor preferentially.”
I’m not sure what I make of all this, but it is surely interesting to consider. Of course, these sacred “African Village Values” are pretty much destroyed anyway by now – Africans would claim by the Dreaded Colonialists.
Incidentally, in Dar it turned out that the Radiologist who did my ultrasound was Guatemalan. He agreed with me in the similarity of Tz and Guate climates, but was much less willing to see cultural similarities, apart from things resulting from the level of poverty. And Guate has too many guns. But he readily agreed that there is a much higher energy level in Central America, when compared to Africa. Interesting to get that confirmation of my initial impressions.
