{day 3 - june 11, 2012}

monday, june 11, 2012

after a delicious breakfast - the food here is actually amazing! - we met with our volunteer placement leaders to prepare for our first day of work.  i will spend most mornings at a pre-school about a 10 minute walk from my house and will work with 3-4 year olds.  In my free afternoons, i'm going to try to spend time in the orphanage as well as the HIV clinic.

a typical breakfast - peanut butter toast, eggs, and pineapple!

 my morning tea - kiliminjaro tea is the best!

we also had our first swahili lesson (we have lessons 3 times a week) with mwahleemu (teacher) christine.  it has actually been a lot easier trying to learn the language while immersed in the culture.  the people here are so nice and friendly and want to help us learn swahili as well we can, and in exchange we help them with their english.  i can (i think, at least) already have a fairly long surface level conversation in swahili with a local.  it definitely takes a lot of practice and patience, though!

finally a local doctor from the town came to speak to us about the medical conditions here in bagamoyo and tanzania.  in addition to teaching us about malaria (about 1 child dies every 5 minutes in tanzania from malaria) and cholera (which i honestly thought didn't really exist anymore, but it does here), we spent a good part of the afternoon discussing HIV, which infects approximately 10% of the population here in bagamoyo.  there are so many contributing factors, the most disturbing of which is the fact that female circumcision still occurs in this country, despite being illegal.  16% of the female population here is circumcised, and since it is illegal, this is done with dirty equipment, in dirty environments, and if there is a complication, the girl will not be taken to the hospital for fear of getting caught. i cannot even begin to imagine what these poor women go through here (though it is typically the older women doing this to the younger ones).  it was a very educational afternoon, and one that has definitely affected me quite a bit.

will try to post more soon - it takes about 5 minutes to load one picture at the internet cafe here, so this is a slow process...

xo from tanzani!