'I'm Here!'

1st post-

dated Friday, July 27th, 2007:

'I'm Here!'

"The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us" John 1:14

...The message, lived out in a real person, came to live in our midst.(someone's paraphrase).

We've been here for a week now- the first week of many in our attempt to live out (and proclaim) the message of Christ to the unreached Zaramo people, and what a crazy time it's been. Missionaries often speak of a 'honeymoon' period before the realities of everyday life and culture-shock set in- I think our honeymoon period with Tanzania may have lasted the extent of our trip in to Mzenga :P

We truly had no idea what we were getting into! I mean, not that we were deceived in any way whatsoever, but the idea of a home with mud walls and a mud roof, the idea of a hole in the ground for a latrine, the idea of no plumbing and no electricity... it's all very romantic. The reality, on the other hand, is a far cry from the idea. It's been stretching, but He gives us more grace. Thankfully, we haven't had to cook or wash anything yet... our meals and laundry are taken care of by the Tanners for this week.

Our first week in Mzenga has mostly been spent at out team leaders', the Tanners', home. We went through this intensive Language Acquisition training course called LAMP (Language Acquisition Made Practical), created by a Dr Tom Brewster; which attempts to speed up the process of language acquisition for people who're immersed in a new language. It's been very interesting. After a couple of sessions of theory in the mornings, we meet with Zaramo language helpers in the afternoon, learn a phrase from them, and then walk around our respective villages saying the one phrase, and then smiling with a glazed expression on our faces as our neighbours launch off into a lenghty discourse on the best way to raise chickens (possibly? I'm not too sure)- of which we basically catch one word- Nguku (chicken) :S. It's a daunting time- makes us feel like babies, so helpless in this cultural context. We're often followed by a horde of children who apparently find our exploits more amusing than television (they don't actually have television here, there being no electricity, so it's possible we actually are the most interesting form of entertainment.).

The adults laugh a lot. The children laugh even more, but every once in a while we get ours back- like for example, the first phrase we learned was 'Za Imitondo' (Good morning! lit.-How goes the morning?) So our first day we went around asking people that, and that was pretty much all we were able to say. The children therefore, took to following us and shouting 'Za Imitondo' at all times of the day. Very soon, however, we learned other greetings, like Za Imisi (good afternoon), Za Ichungulo (good evening), and Za Ikiro (good night). So every once in a while, as we walk by in the afternoon or the evening and the children shout out Za Imitondo, we'll shout the proper greeting back, which causes everyone around to laugh at the children - take that children! I think this would actually be a lot funnier if you were in our context and had no tv :P.

So that's been our schedule for most of the first week.

Back to housing- the housing situation, for the most part, hasn't been all that bad. A lot of the zaramo homes are worse. Most of our homes are actually made of cement with a tin roof, and are pretty sealed. The one exception, of couse, is the single guys' home- my home. Ours is the only home actually made of mud, with walls made of mud-on-sticks that crack if you punch them (i killed a hornet with my sandal on the front wall, and took off a chunk of wall). Needless to say, the mud walls also attract all manner of critters. All our homes have been infested with ants- this being a tropical country, ants rule the ground. Our home, however, has also had a good number of mosquitoes (our windows are screened, but we don't have screen doors yet, and the wooden planks our doors are made of have shrunk a little, so there's half-inch gaps between the plancks. Thankfully, we sleep under mosquito nets). The mosquitoes, in turn, have attracted spiders. My roommate Jeremy is an arachnophile (thats the opposite of an arachnophobe), and refuses to kill spiders since they kill mosquitoes; so pretty much every corner in our home has a resident spider. I'm going to walk through and name them soon. I think I've been bitten by a spider on the arm, but I haven't yet developed spiderman's powers.

The battalion of ants that go through our home has also attracted scorpions, and those've been fun. We kill them if we come accross them, they're between 1 and 2 inches long. The food in our kitchen has also attacted mice. These seem pretty small and helpless to me (they're around 2 inches long, plus tail), but Jeremy isn't a big fan of those, so he's crushed 2 or 3 already (he jumps on them- all 200 lbs of him), leaving little puddles of blood on our floor (we've cleaned the blood). He then adds insult to injury by filming the ants tear appart the body in a couple of hours. That is quite the sight,

Now our house also slopes a bit, and between the front door and the back door there's actually a 13 inch drop, so you'd think that any rain would just go in and gather at the back, but it's cool, cos there's also a 3-4 inch gap between the back-door and the floor (the door opens inward see, so to compensate for the tremendous slope, it needs to be off the floor or else it won't open), so the rain'll go right out again, hopefully without washing the mud walls away :P). Just last night we also had a toad in our bathroom (probably came in the backdoor). Now, I'd once read that some toads excrete poision from their skins, but I couldn't remember whether those were in the Amazon, in Australia, or in Africa, and we didn't want to take any chances, so getting rid of the toad was quite the adventure.

Thankfully, there's enough people in the area that the snakes seem to have been scared off. None of us has ever seen one (including our team leaders) - they're very rare in the area. We don't actually have any snake serum or anything, but apparently, if a scorpion or a snake bites you, there's this device that you attach close to the bite and it sends jolts of electricity through you. The electricity hurts a heck of a lot (not quite as bad as a tazer), but it changes the chemical composition of the protein in the snake venom, and makes it absorbable by the body. That's our defense. In a pinch, the spark plug off of a motorbike would do too (hold it to your skin and try kick-starting the bike several times). Quite fascinating.

Another point of note is our 'Cho' holes (latrines). They were devised by Tim, our team-leader (the Zaramo can't really end words with consonants, all letters have to have a vowel-sound attached to them, so they can't pronounce Timmmmmm, they call him Timo, for Timotheo. Likewise, I've become Dani, no Dannnnn), and are one of the marvels of local engineering. They basically consist of a bucket (with the bottom cut out) stuck in the ground, over a deep concrete pit. We actually have a wooden structure over the bucket, so we don't have to squat, we can sit on our cho. So all our... presents... go through the bucket and to the bottom of the pit, where they collect, and then we close our end with a lid. Now, you'd think this would leave one horrible-smelling hole, full of all kinds of nasty insects, but in fact it does not! Tim attached a long pipe to the bottom which slants up through the floor and ends up above the house. As our... presents... decompose, they create heat, and the hot, smelly air rises. It meets the lid on our cho and can go no further, but the pipe end being higher, it keeps rising up through the pipe, creating a vacuum and thus a convection current trough the cho. So cooler air is sucked in through the cracks on the lid at our end, and the stinky air all escapes through the pipe, safely over our house where it rises up and joins the rest of the methane that's causing all the global warming. The pipe is also painted black, so on hot, sunny days (it's currently winter, and a chilly 28 C during the day), the pipe heats up, the air in the pipe heats up, and the convection current moves that much faster. It's genius I tell you, our stinky-hole never stinks! (except at around 3 am, as i discovered once when I was still jetlagged).

And with that lovely picture in your minds, I will say goodbye. Thank you for all your prayers, we're still alive and pretty well. Hope you're well too! Don't forget to write to me:

Daniel Andrade

C/o EFCM Intl'

PO Box 63367 (I think, check out the top of the blog page)

Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Toodleloo!