"Vijijini" (In the Villages)

Hamjambo!! Hello everyone! Over the past two weeks I visited two rural Tanzanian villages with GSC: Maroroni and Tingatinga.

During my first week of field work, we camped out in Maroroni village (about an hour’s drive from Arusha). We brought buckets of our own clean drinking water, we heated up water for our bucket-baths using a good old-fashioned fire, and there was a pit latrine located conveniently in the center of our campsite. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner were made for us by a local, Leonardi, but they were made on a Tanzanian time schedule (one day dinner for 7pm was ready at 9pm). There’s not much to Maroroni. It’s extremely dry, there are chickens and donkeys roaming around everywhere, no electricity, and lots of school children who are fascinated by wazungu but too afraid to talk to us. The village people were mostly very welcoming, especially our trainees. Each day, me and the other trainers taught groups of villagers about bio-intensive agriculture (kilimo hai in Swahili). Kilimo hai is “a method of organic farming rooted in maintaining soil fertility and living soil.” We teach in English and everything we say is translated for the villagers by our Tanzanian interns into Swahili. The first couple days we just lecture, but the rest of the week we demonstrate kilimo hai through practicals. Our first group was extremely attentive, and it was really cool working side-by-side with the locals!

 

We were in Tingatinga, a Maasai village, for my second week of field work. This was my home during my stay: 

 

The scenery was much nicer than in Maroroni (which was like barren savannah). Tingatinga actually has green plants, and you can see Kilimanjaro from almost anywhere in the village!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A lot of the little kids here were excited to see wazungu and not too shy to talk to us, but I did run into one little girl who cried when she saw us because she was scared of wazungu. However we did make some friends in Tingatinga. We became quite close with two little kids, Everest and Kesia (right).

 

On another note, unfortunately we didn’t have any trainees this week. We had almost 50 people registered for our trainings but only a couple showed up. We were told that this happened because the villagers don’t want to come unless they get paid for it (some organizations do offer money for people to come to their trainings, but not GSC). But I don’t even want to teach people who just come for money! In order for what we teach to actually make a difference, we need people who are actually interested in learning about kilimo hai so that they will use it when we leave. Anyway, we had to cancel the trainings and we made some keyhole gardens and grain storage tanks for a few villagers instead.

 

This Friday was both Sarah’s and Ayo’s birthday, so of course we went out to celebrate!! -->

After a fun night at the Babylon Club, Saturday we went on a hike up Mt. Meru to the waterfalls with Luke’s host-brother, Hans, as our guide. The whole climb was absolutely gorgeous, and I finally got to see the tropical side of Africa!

Lots of exciting things to come!! This week I’ll be teaching kilimo hai in a new village, I get to hang out with my dad next weekend, and then I’m off to Zanzibar! NBD.