Third an fourth weeks in the vill!

Nick, I'm so so proud of you!!! I told you that you passed! Good luck with the rest! I know you'll be awesome! And amazing that you already have your first client. You're so big time...stacking up those papers! :) And sorry about the traffic...I DO know how you feel about that haha Tell CLam I say hi! Love/miss you mucho mucho!!!


Sonic!!! Miss you so much! How's Hellions going? Good luck with your first tournaments!!! How's recruitment going??? Life in the village is awesome! It's totally safe for us to walk around at night although I probably wouldn't by myself. It's always us 3 girls walking together though so it's good. As for pictures, we usually try to hide our cameras because otherwise they ask you to take a million pictures but they're all just super excited about them and want to see it in the camera after you take it. Everything's super awesome though :)



Smelly!!! I miss you so much too! I can't wait to come back and tell you all about it! We'll go get margaritas or something...or the sushi place!!! haha

Alli! So good to hear from you. Ya Gerald was on your trip. He said he remembered Nicole! :) Things are so great! We've tested 600 people and taught about 4000. The nutella has been discovered haha. First and last is our number one place we go to for lunch on Babati weekends for chips myai delicious!!! I am having plenty of chipati for you have no fear haha. Thanks for all your help prepping. Can't wait to tell you all about it!!!

Okay now for updates!!!

Things in the vill are still amazing! We spent the last two weeks mostly on advertising for our testing day which was this past Tuesday. We tested 166 people which is super awesome!!! Endodash tested 203 but their dad is like the head of the village and everyone loves him and does everything he says including getting tested and other than them we tested the most out of the 5 villages and we did it all on our own haha. Plus we advertised to one of our subvillages to go to their testing cuz it's closer so they tested some of our people too. So it was amazing! It was a lot of hard work. We made like 15 posters and about 1000 small fliers that we all wrote out by hand and handed out to people so we could talk to them individually. "Tunafanya upimaji wa virusi via Ukimwi Jummanne pale Ofisi ya Kijiji...Karibuni!" - "We are testing for HIV Thursday at the village office...everyone is welcome!" haha We walked like 4 hours a day in addition to our teachings at the schools. It was totally worth it though to see all the people that came out! We're doing another combo testing with Endodash on Thursday and then next weekend is our big Community Day (or really weekend) where all 5 of the villages will be working together to put on this big testing event with DJs and a soccer tournament and performances. So we're going to be busy busy for the next week but I'm so excited!!! I think it's going to be amazing :)

The schools teachings have been going really well too. We had some trouble with Form 3 this past week (that's the equivalent of like Junior/Senior year in high school and is the oldest students we teach). They just like randomly went to Galapo secondary to do a lab practical cuz they don't have a laboratory at Qash secondary so the students just weren't there when we went to teach them. Kind of frustrating but we'll reschedule a make-up session.

We've also been having some trouble with our peer educators. We're the only village with a secondary school which means we teach twice as much as everyone else but it also means we get to do something called peer educators. It's where we train some of the best students at the secondary school to take over for us after we leave. We've had a lot of cancelled sessions and other road blocks but we have some ideas about how to make it better that we're going to implement starting this week so hopefully things will turn around. I was so excited to be able to do peer educators so I really hope it works out!!!

Other than that things have been great! Our group gets along so well so we're hoping they don't mix up the groups when we move to Babati for the last month. I guess some of the groups are having problems though so we'll see. It's rained a bit the past couple weeks but never for very long and then it goes back to being super hot! :)

We have two more weeks of crunch time in the village and then we get our week off. I'm going to Uganda for the beginning to go river rafting down the nile and then we have a two day safari in this huge crater thing!!! So friggin excited!!! We're definitely going to need the break after all our hard work in the village. And there's Americanized food there so I'm SUPER excited for that!!! I miss cheese and salads the most! haha

To end this post, I'll leave you guys with a couple jokes our group made up: (For your information, when you first greet someone older that you, you have to say Shikamoo and then they respond with Marahaba)

What did the baby cow say to the mama cow? Shikamooooo!

What did the mama sheep say to the baby sheep? Marahabaaaaah!

hahahahaha

Asante sana squashed banana! Miss you all so so SOOOOO much!!! I hope you're all doing really well!

Lots and lots of love!

Ilana

First two weeks in the village

Hey guys! Thanks for all the comments you've been leaving me. It's so great to hear from you cuz I miss you all soooo much!!!

The skirts are pretty much just like normal skirts that people wear back home; they just have to cover our knees when we sit down so don't get too excited. The fabrics here are super cool though so you can get excited about that haha

For those of you who have said you want to learn Swahili, I am so down to teach you when I get back. I actually like the language a lot and I feel like I'm picking it up pretty fast now that I'm exposed to it like 24/7. It's just 3 of us American girls living in our homestay so we had to pick things up fast if we wanted to communicate with our families haha

Speaking of homestays, we got our groups and mine is great. I'm with Jen and then if any of you know Becca Lynch who's also from USC. I don't know why they put three USC people together but I'm certainly not complaining. Me and Jen share a room and then Becca has her own. Our family is so nice and really patient and really helpful. We have a mom and a dad and a 19 year old brother (kaka in Swahili) Afith, a 17 year old sister(dada) Alima, a 15 year old sister also Alima haha, a 12 year old sister Shaam, and a 9 year old brother Abudina. They're all so awesome.

The rest of our group is made up of Joseph, a 22 year old Tanzanian teaching partner who's just a big goof and a really good teacher and Gerald, a 27 year old teaching partner who we call Baba Bear (Baba means dad) He's the dad of the group and so nice and a really good teacher. They live at another homestay. I'm super happy with my group; we all get along really well :)

We've been really busy in the villages. We teach primary school everyday from 8:40-10. This week we taught secondary school everyday from 11:25-12:45 but starting next week it'll just be Monday Wednesday and maybe another day. We will also be training the best and the brightest from the secondary school to be peer educators so we'll be meeting with them Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 3. Apart from the school teachings we have to do community teachings. The first day we were there we were hanging out at this duka (store) that we always go to now and randomly ended up teaching like 50 people. The next day we went to watch Qash secondary school play the villagers in soccer and taught like another 150 people. We also taught 80 people in one of our subvillages last Tuesday and randomly teach small groups of people that we pass by when we have some time. So pretty much we're rockstars haha. We're started a little competition between the villages to see who teaches the most people and we definitely won the first week haha

We're having a free testing day in our village on October 27th and then there's this big community day (or really community weekend) on the 7th and 8th where all the villages will come together and have this big free testing campain. So hopefully we'll get lots of people tested.

Just to give you an idea of village life, our bathroom is a little brick thing with a hole in the center that leads to a like 30 feet deep hole (except ours is really full so it's like 7 feet away- gross! they're building another one) Think porter potty. Our shower is water in a bucket that's heated on coals and we pour it over ourselves with a bowl. Our homestay is a 45 minute walk to Joseph and Gerald's homestay and then everything is near them so we try to limit that to just walking there in the morning and back at night. We're also looking into getting some bikes but Becca doesn't know how to ride one so she'll have to ride on the back haha The food is a lot of carbs like rice and rice and rice and this thing called ugali that I can't even explain. There's also lots of beans and spinach and we buy ourselves a lot of fruit to subsidize. The thing I miss most is cheese. The only calcium I get is from my power bars.

So things in the village have been super awesome. I feel like we're really accomplishing a lot and my group has so much fun hanging out together. We want to try to find a soccer ball and a deck of cards while we're here though.

Guess that's it for now. Hope everything is great on your side of the road. Can't wait to hear all about all your lives :) I'll be back in Babati in two weeks so that's when I'll have internet again.

Asante sana squashed banana!

PS Fight on SC for beating Notre Dame!!! Fuck ya!!!

Moving to the villages

I only have like 5 minutes on my internet time left but just wanted to let you know that orientation ends on Monday and we move to the villages on Tuesday and finally get to start teaching!!!

So from now on I'll only have internet access on weekends when I come back to Babati and we have to stay in the villages through the first weekend so no posts til the weekend after that.

Finally got our skirts! They're awesome (for those of you who don't know girls have to wear skirts everyday that go past our knees and no tanktops...and it's hot!) I love the skirts though. So cute.

We find out our teaching groups tomorrow. Can't wait!

Miss you all so much! Can't wait to tell you more about the Tanzanians. They're all so friendly :)

Asante sana squashed banana!
Ilana