About two years ago Kristen Grauer-Gray ’07 journeyed to Tanzania to work as a Peace Corps volunteer. A few days ago she wrote to a large number of friends to inform them that she’s counting the days until her return. In “Letters from Tanzania #12” (Aug 21), Kristen writes:
“Habari zenu? As you’ll see from this e-mail, I’ll be leaving Tanzania
soon. I’d love to travel on my way home, and visit as many friends as
possible on the way. So the question is….where in the world will you
be between the beginning of November and the end of December? In case
of delayed travels, where will you be at the beginning of 2011? Do you
have a extra bed, couch, or soft floor for a very dazed Peace Corps
volunteer? You provide the floor, I’ll provide the harmonica songs
and crazy stories, and we’ll catch up on the last three years of life.
Let me know where you’ll be and I’ll start marking the map of the world on my wall. I’m thinking of a long bus trip across the U.S.,
with many many stops on the way.”
–Kristen, 21 August 2010, Karatu district, Tanzania
I suspect that Kristen didn’t expect her emails to wind up on our news page, but I think her “crazy story” is so wonderful, it deserves to be reported in full, so here is the rest of her email on life in Tanzania (and if you would like to communicate with her, write to her at grauergk@gmail.com) … (Aug 31 update: Three more letters from Kristen have arrived in the last couple of days and I’ve added them unedited to this post. They cover the joys and hardships of teaching chemistry, the Peace Corps, and dealing with AIDS in Africa.)
Letter # 12
The Last Leg
For the past few days, I’ve been relentlessly playing the following
song on my harmonica:
Oh my bags are packed, I’m ready to go,
I’m standing here outside your door,
I hate to wake you up to say goodbye…
‘Cause I’m leaving on a jet plane….
There are exactly two months and a week left until I officially finish
my Peace Corps service. Counting down the days is a dangerous business
here, where the many setbacks of everyday life can make the hours drag
if you let them. Mostly I focus on day-to-day tasks: teaching classes,
preparing solutions in the school labs, cooking dinner. But every now
and then, I look at the calendar, and I marvel at how much time has
passed. After 35 months in Tanzania, two months and a week is nothing.
I know it will pass so quickly that I’ll wonder where the time went.
And while it’s a little early to start packing my bags, I am ready to
go.
They say that the last leg of any race is the hardest, and it’s true.
You can walk for thousands of miles without worrying about the
distance remaining, but when you only have a few miles left, and you
can see the peak of the mountain you’re climbing in the distance, time
seems to slow. Just putting one foot in front of the other requires a
great effort. So it is with me: with a little over two months to go,
the amount of work to be done at school has multiplied exponentially.
My students have five weeks to go until their national exams. In that
time, they need to practice two separate chemistry practicals,
requiring entirely different apparatus and chemicals. They need to
review what they’ve already learned. I should probably give them notes
on the topics I skipped for lack of teaching time. On top of that,
there’s a practice exam the week after next, and instead of preparing
the labs I’ve spent the weekend writing that exam. Time will pass
whether I teach all day or sit in my house playing the harmonica, but
I believe in finishing strong, and these students are the reason I
stayed in Tanzania so long. It will be a busy few weeks.
In some ways I’ve become Tanzanian. I never used to understand why Tanzanians plan so little for the future. It seemed to me that
everyone around me was living at the brink of chaos, just barely
managing to deal with each minute as it came, ignoring the future.
Teachers would come running to me looking for the labs keys five
minutes before their class, expecting the required chemicals to be
ready even though they hadn’t bothered to check. Neighbors would
realize they were out of sugar when the tea was already on the table,
and send a child running to the duka (shop) to buy more. As someone
who plans far into the future, this made no sense to me.
Well, here I am, as Tanzanian as my neighbors. Do I know where I’m going to be three months from now? Do I know where I’ll travel on my
way home? Bado, bado. I’m still trying to figure out what I’ll be
teaching tomorrow. I’m so bogged down in the details of daily life
that I can barely see as far as this evening. Will I get back to my
village in time to prepare dilute nitric acid for tomorrow’s
practical? Will I actually have time to correct my students’ homework
before tomorrow morning’s classes? I don’t know what date I’m leaving
Tanzania, where I’m traveling on my way home, or what type of work
I’ll look for when I get back. The present here is so vivid and
demanding that I’ll be lucky if I even fill out all my close of
service Peace Corps forms in time.
But Tanzania has taught me that the future has a way of working
itself out. For the next few weeks, I’ll be focusing on my students,
on keeping the promises I’ve made to them and myself, and on finishing
strong. When they start their exams, I’ll have a little breathing
room. That’s when I’ll finally look around, pack my bags, and start
trying to process all that’s happened in the past three years.
Hope all is well in America, Tanzania, or wherever you are!
-Kristen
—-
28 August 2010
Karatu district, Tanzania
Letter #13
Practicals, Part 1
“Don’t become like Newton,” a teacher tells me when I emerge from the
labs for lunch.
“Newton? What do you mean, like Newton.”
“Newton spent so much time in the lab that he forgot to eat. He also
forgot to get married.”
I didn’t forget to eat, I explain. My students just had so many
questions that I never got a chance to leave the labs for chai. And as
for marriage, my thoughts weren’t tending in that direction anyway.
But yeah, I am spending too much time in the labs. What else to do
when there are two hundred students relying on me to teach them
chemistry practicals?
Here’s the situation. A student’s chemistry score on the national exams is based fifty percent on the theory portion of the exam, and
fifty percent on the lab practical. Theory is difficult for my
students. It covers about twenty different topics from all four years
of O-level chemistry. The English is difficult, and sometimes just
bad. The questions are often poorly written, or lack important data,
or focus on tiny and unimportant parts of the curriculum. I’ve been
teaching these students for almost three years straight, and I’ve
covered nearly all the topics in the syllabus, to the point where I
was sure they could pass. Even they were sure. We’re not worried about
chemistry, they told me. We’ll all get high marks on the mock exams.
Well. The mock exam in chemistry is worth a hundred points. Most of
them got less than thirty. Out of 196 students, zero got an A. Only
three got a B. This in a country where 61% is considered a B.
My students were depressed for days after the results came back. Some
of them stopped coming to school. Why bother? they told me. We’re just
going to fail the national exams anyway.
I could have told them that the system is unfair. That the exams are
written poorly. That the mock exams are corrected badly. That some of
the questions on the exam weren’t even on the syllabus. That the
system is inherently against students who studied at a village primary
school and never learned English well. But I didn’t. There was no
point in depressing them about a system they’re stuck with.
Or I could have lectured them like the academic master. I could have
told them that their scores were equal to the numbers on shoe sizes. I
could have told them they were lazy, and should study harder. But I
didn’t, because laziness isn’t the main problem. Some of my hardest
working students failed that exam. They’re studying as hard as they
can, and they do well on my tests. Yet they didn’t even manage a C on
the mock exam.
There are many problems in the system, but the fact is, I can’t
change them. So I swallowed my annoyance and turned to the one route
that I knew would help the students pass.
Practical, I told them. Practical ni tumaini yenu. Practical
itakuinua. This mock exam had only theory. But in the national exams,
the practical is fifty percent of your grade. And the practical is
predictable. It has the same two kinds of questions every year, and if
you can answer those two questions you can pass your chemistry exam.
We’re doing nothing but practicals for the next month.
—
At the beginning of August, we started with practical one:
qualitative analysis. Man is this practical a pain. Students are given a salt, and they have to identify it. Is it copper (II) sulphate? Lead
nitrate? Sodium carbonate? There are eight possible cations, and five
possible anions, and ten steps to follow in identifying the salt. The
practical requires about fifteen different solutions to be available,
many of which are dangerous. All groups need to have access to
concentrated acid. And a source of heat. And sodium hydroxide. And
ammonia. You can’t open the windows because the wind will put out the
Bunsen burner flames, but you can’t close them because the experiments
create fumes.
This experiment is a safety nightmare. Imagine fifty students in a
lab, with five or six students crowded around each table. Bunsen
burner flames burn merrily beside flimsy paper notebooks. Students
reach over the flame for bottles of chemicals. Others cheerfully chat
with their friends while holding a test tube full of acid in one hand.
The teacher walks around the room, turning off gas faucets that have been left on, telling students to point their test tubes at the sink
and not their friends. Why are you heating a test tube full to the brim! Is that acid? Punguza, punguza! It’s going to jump out at your face when it starts boiling! And whatever you do, don’t aim that test
tube at your friend.
No one has goggles. No one has gloves. At least there’s a fire
extinguisher and eight buckets of water in case of any accidents with
the Bunsen burners.
Qualitative analysis is a hazard and a headache. But there’s a small
and irrational part of me that loves teaching it. To put it simply,
this practical is cool. Beautiful blue copper salts sit in beakers on
the table, turn flames green, and form a inky blue solution in
ammonia. Precipitates appear at the addition of a single drop of base,
then vanish when more base is added. Carbonates produce masses of
bubbles with acid, which spill out of the test tube and into the sink.
Litmus paper changes colour when an invisible gas passes through it.
And the best part of it all is, all of these reactions have been
taught. Students have written them in their notebooks, memorized them,
written them on tests. Every now and then, I even get enough of a
break from the constant student questions to explain what is
happening. You know this reaction, I tell a student. Copper sulphate
plus sodium hydroxide. What precipitate are you looking at here?
Carbonate plus acid. Why are bubbles forming? Their eyes light up when
they realize they can actually explain what they’re seeing. When they
finally, finally connect the theory they’ve been studying to reality.
But it’s exhausting. Two hundred students. Three ninety minute
practicals on Monday, two on Tuesday, three on Thursday. Wednesday and Friday are for making new solutions and catching just enough rest to stay sane. It’s a crazy schedule, and I wouldn’t recommend it to
anyone.
Yet the students are truly getting it, and they’re becoming
confident. And some of the most skilled students at the practical are the ones who have always failed chemistry exams. They’re excited.
They’re motivated. And their energy is just enough to keep me going as
well.
—
Practicals (Part 2)
Nearly a month straight of qualitative analysis. And then, it’s time
for practical two: titration.
Ah, but titration is easy. All you have to do is make two large
buckets of acid and base. Each table needs some beakers, a flask, a
burette, a pipette, some indicator. There’s no flames, and the acid is
dilute and fairly harmless to touch. Yes, this practical will be
simple.
Okay, I admit it. Tanzania has destroyed my sense of perspective.
Teaching four lab sessions of fifty students isn’t exactly simple. But
the lack of open flames did make for a nice break.
The first, and most overwhelming step in preparing the titration
practical: to wash the dust off the apparatus. I call eight students
who have previously broken a test tube to the lab, and tell them their
punishment is to wash all the apparatus required for titration. All
the burettes, beakers, and flasks are ready within an hour. The
benches are clean. The retort stands have been dusted off. Sure, there
are some burettes with broken tips that need fixing, and I need to
label the beakers. But the apparatus are basically ready.
Second step: to prepare solutions. There are two student teachers from the University of Dar es Salaam at my school, who have
enthusiastically volunteered to help out in the labs. Having the help
is awesome, but actually gives me more work: I can’t employ my usual
sloppy shortcuts while teaching student teachers how to make
solutions. So we measure everything slowly and carefully, and spend about two hours making the solutions: fifteen liters of base in one
large bucket, ten liters of acid in another. Then we spend about two
hours standardizing the solution, adding small amounts of water or a
little more acid until our measured titration volume is equal to the
one we wanted. Finally, around five-thirty in the evening, we
pronounce the solutions ready and go home.
Third step: to introduce the students to a new apparatus. Glass
pipettes are a beautiful and elegant chemistry tool, when used by a
careful chemist in a well-equipped lab. They’re a fragile pain in the neck in a village secondary school. They constantly break. They’re
expensive. They’re poorly calibrated and don’t measure the volume they
claim to hold. And since students fill them with their mouths, nearly
every practical features a student sucking up a mouthful of sodium
hydroxide.
Besides, who needs a pipette when you can buy a syringe for fifteen
cents? I hold up a 20 mL syringe to my students. “Hii ni pipette mpya
ya kisasa,” I tell them. This is a new and modern pipette. This is
what you’ll be using on the exams.
The plastic syringe looks like a toy compared to the imported glass
pipettes that the students have used in the past. I’m a little afraid
that they’ll ask me why we’re employing a tool used to give shots to cattle. But they don’t. They love the syringes. “Inarahisisha kazi,”
one of my best students tells me. It makes the practical easier. The
fifteen cent syringes gives beautiful data, and not a single student
accidentally drinks the base.
The syringes made my life easier, and I’m thankful to my Peace Corps
friends for convincing me to use them in the lab. But was the
practical easy? Well, not really. Four or five groups called for my
attention at a time, for ninety minutes straight. Flasks were thrust
into my face. Students competed for my attention, to the point where
I’d give a one sentence answer and move on.
“Wrong colour,” I’d say. “That’s pink. You’ve gone past the endpoint.
Start over.”
“That’s still yellow. The colour hasn’t changed. Add another drop.
No, not ten drops! One, one! Okay, start over again.”
“You want more base? Go get more base. It’s in a beaker in the front.”
“No! Don’t let the acid out of the burette that quickly! Burette yako
inakojoa! Isiwe kama inakojoa. Drop by drop! Drop by drop!”
Read the bottom of the meniscus. Don’t bang the pipette tip against
the side of the flask. Pole pole, slowly, slowly. I repeated the same
advice for nearly five hours on Thursday, and for another two hours on
Friday morning. I know I’m exhausted when I start snapping at my
students, and I don’t think my students have ever seen me in as bad a
mood as I’ve been in the lab lately. For that matter, I rarely see
myself in that bad of a mood.
I’m always too optimistic about how easy teaching these practicals
will be. What I saw as an hour long experiment took two hours. An
entire bucketful of acid nearly ran out, to the point where I had to
make more acid the next morning. An example of the sloppy shortcuts I
referred to earlier: since the half hour before the practical wasn’t
nearly enough time to actually measure out the acid and standardize a new solution, I just dumped some water and concentrated acid in a
bucket. Then I measured the new titre, and changed the data in the
question so that my students’ calculations would work out. Yeah, I’m
going straight to scientists’ hell, but at least my students will know
how to titrate.
And how could I chase my students out of the lab, or make them stop
practicing, when I used to be that student who left the lab late? Who
repeated the experiment over and over, with the data never coming out
right? “Titrate again,” I told the students. “Even four times. Five
times. Keep titrating until you get it down. Today you’re practicing;
on another day, we’ll try to do everything quickly as if it’s an
exam.”
Two and a half hours after the last session started, I finally chased
the last two students out of the lab. A few hours later, I hopped on a
car to town for a weekend long break. I’ve been spending the last few
days cooking good food and catching up on my e-mails at a friend’s
house. It’s a badly needed rest.
But by next week, I’ll probably be back in the lab. Because for the
first time in my three years of teaching here, nearly all of my the
students are getting it. Not the top five. Not the few sitting in the front. Almost all of them. And in a school system that always seems to
be against them, where they can study for four years and barely scrape
together thirty points on an exam, I’m happy to see them becoming
confident about something.
—
29 August 2010
Karatu district, Tanzania
Letter #14
Ukimwi (AIDS)
(Note: Names have been changed)
When I go to town, I usually stay with my friend Rebecca. I arrived
in town last weekend to find that Rebecca had gone to Uganda. “When
will she be back?” I asked one of her employees.
Next weekend, was the answer. But Amanda is around, and she can give
you the keys. So I went to Rebecca’s housekeeper to ask for the keys
to the house.
Amanda wasn’t home. I followed one of her relatives along a narrow
dirt path between houses, and found her sitting with friends outside a
neighbor’s house.
“Habari za Endamarariek?” she greeted me. “How are things in your village?”
They’re good, I told her, but busy. “How is your health?” I asked.
The last time I’d seen her, she’d been throwing up in a car on the way
to the hospital.
“It’s a bit better,” she said briefly. “Come on, I’ll open the door
to the house for you.”
We walked to the house, and the two dogs followed us inside. Amanda
sat down on a chair and began to play with them. She was
uncharacteristically quiet. In all the time I’ve known her, I’ve never
seen her just sit down. She’s always busy: cleaning the house,
feeding the dogs, washing clothes. And despite all that work she’s
always cheerful, always in a good mood. But now she just sat, solemn
and sad.
“Are you feeling better?” I asked her again. “You were really sick that day.”
“It’s true, I was,” she said. “They put me on a drip with medicine.”
“What was it?” I asked. “Malaria?”
“Yes,” she said briefly. Then, “Rebecca didn’t tell you?”
I haven’t seen Rebecca in over two weeks, I told her. It’s been busy
at school.
“I was still feeling sick, so I went to the hospital again to have my
blood tested. Nina ugonjwa wa kisasa.”
Ugonjwa wa kisasa. The modern disease. It took a minute for that to click.
Then it did. What disease do people talk around, instead of saying
its name? What disease is in the news all the time, in every African
country? Ugonjwa wa kisasa is AIDS.
“Pole sana,” I told her. “I’m very sorry. Did you get medicine?”
Yes, she said, she had. But she still sat there, gazing into space,
and it was clear she wanted to talk more.
Here I was, exhausted from a week of teaching practicals, sick of the
problems of village life, and desperate for a break from Tanzania in
general. A part of me really didn’t want to have this conversation. I
don’t know if I can do this, I thought. I don’t know if I can help.
People never ask me for advice, not about emotions, not about life. My
students ask me how to balance equations and study for exams and hold
a flask during titration. My friends ask me how to prepare a
Tanzanian laboratory and deal with large classes and when do I expect
to pass through their town or village in my travels. Somehow I manage
to keep my own mental equilibrium and sanity, but that doesn’t mean I
know how I do it, it doesn’t mean I can pass that equilibrium onto
others. Yet here’s this middle-aged Tanzanian woman, clearly wanting
to talk. She can’t talk to her relatives for fear of the stigma
against people with AIDS. She can’t talk to Rebecca because Rebecca is
out of town and doesn’t speak Swahili anyway. And then I come to town,
a neutral and non-judgmental party, speaking fluent Swahili and understanding Tanzanian culture. I guess that makes me the perfect
person to talk to.
So here goes.
I tell her that the medicine can help her live for a long time, but
that she needs to take care of herself as well. I tell her to eat
well: lots of fruits and vegetables, not just starches. I tell her the
medicine may bother her stomach or make her feel nauseous, but she
needs to keep taking it.
Is there a cure for AIDS in America? she asks. Don’t they have a cure?
No, there’s no cure, not even in America. There are just medicines to
keep the virus from getting too strong, like they have here. Think of
it as an unwanted guest in your body, I say. It will always be there, but you can keep it from doing too much damage too fast.
So the end is always death? she asks.
Mwisho wa maisha ni kifo. The end of life is always death. For you,
for me, for everyone. And we can never know when that day is coming. I
had a friend, young like me, in perfectly good health, who died
suddenly in an accident. He’d been teaching in Tanzania for almost two
years and was supposed to be going home soon. You can be young and
strong and die unexpectedly, or you can have AIDS and take care of
yourself and live for many years. Don’t spend all your time thinking
about death. Enjoy the days as they come. Enjoy spending time with
your children. Enjoy sitting in the sunlight. Just enjoy life and
don’t spend all your time thinking about the end.
We agree that spending long periods of time sitting alone is a bad
plan, and spending time with others can help. She tells me that she
likes to come sit and play with Rebecca’s dogs, and that playing with
them makes her feel better.
We keep talking, but she still looks worried and depressed. This is
new to me. I’ve never, ever seen a Tanzanian look depressed. I know
people who have lived incredibly hard lives, their parents died when
they were young, their crops failed, their children are sick, they
don’t have money for school fees. Yet even the people with the most
depressing life stories always manage to appear happy on the outside.
I’m worried about my children, Amanda tells me. My husband left me
many years ago, and he’s not going to come back and help them. He
hasn’t even visited them in years. That’s just how it works in Africa.
The children are the mother’s, and my husband and his relatives will
do nothing to help them.
Start planning early, I tell her. Do you have any relatives who will
be willing to take care of them? Can you start putting aside money to
pay for their education? You know, there are organizations out there that help that children of people with AIDS, and I’m sure Rebecca will
help you to find them.
She’s a good person, I add, and she’ll do what she can to help you.
I said what I could, and I hope it helped, and I tried to swallow my
own problems and be cheerful whenever I saw Amanda that weekend. I
went back to my village a few days later, but I saw Amanda again the
next time I was in town. Rebecca was still in Uganda, and Amanda
really did look sick. She sent her relatives to the gate of Rebecca’s
house around eight at night, to tell me she was sick and to come to
her house. I felt way out of my depth and wished that Rebecca were
home from Uganda. But she wasn’t, so I followed Amanda’s relatives
along narrow dirt paths in the dark, and found her lying in bed with
her eyes closed. She had ulcers, or another stomach problem brought on
by the anti-retroviral drugs, and she’d gone to the hospital to ask
about medicine. She handed me a piece of paper with the name of a
medicine written down on it.
Magnesium, I read. But I don’t understand what the problem is. Is it
that the pharmacies are closed for the night? Is it money to buy the
medicine?
Money, she whispers. I gave her five thousand shillings. In the
morning she showed up at the house, looking slightly better but still
very sick. She fed the dogs and turned off the outside lights and
grabbed the pot for cooking more food for the animals, all while
telling me she was too still sick to go to church. And then she told
me she would do her best to return the money to me.
Really, I told her, don’t worry about it. And I added to myself, you
have enough to worry about already. —
According to UNICEF, Tanzania has a 6.2 percent HIV rate. About
1,400,000 people are estimated to be living with HIV. I’ve lived in
this country for three years, and Amanda is the only person I’ve ever
met who told me she has HIV. But I doubt that HIV is uncommon in my
town. I’ve only recently realized this, but Karatu is a transit town,
on a recently paved road, with lots of truckers and other travelers
passing through. Some of these travelers have a lot of money. If
that’s not a recipe for the spread of HIV, I don’t know what is.
A lot is being done to prevent that spread. HIV prevention is in the
school curriculum, government clinics offer free testing, and there
are lots of NGOs teaching people about HIV. But many factors are also
working against prevention, from economic problems that lead to
prostitution, to a traditional culture that leads women to be passive
and lack confidence, to the fact that it’s often normal and accepted
to have many lovers. HIV is in the villages, of course, but it’s often
a larger problem in towns, where there are so many travelers passing
through, and people without farms and crops are a bit more desperate
to acquire money.
Like many young Tanzanians, my students want to move to town the
first chance they have. I just hope they’ll be careful.