We’re here! Karagwe district is now beginning to feel like a
place we can call home. Even though these last two weeks in Tanzania have felt
like ‘the longest in my life’, as quoted by a few of the volunteers, I can see
how the next weeks will fly by. Time can pass strangely among the banana trees.
So, we landed in Mwanza on Saturday after lots of changes
and a total of 19 hours’ flying to find that 16 out of our 21 bags were still
knocking around in Nairobi airport somewhere. We had noticed the sceptical
looks on the Nairobi luggage handlers’ faces, looking from our mountain of
luggage to the tiny space in the aeroplane’s hold, but remained (naively)
optimistic.
Anyway, our pillar of positivity of a Programme Supervisor,
Frank, met us and we arranged ourselves in a tiny minibus for the “probably 4
or 5 hour” journey to Bukoba. 9 hours later we arrived in Bukoba and met our
counterpart team of national volunteers! Our emotions rode a rollercoaster from
excitement to anticipation to impatience to terror as we approached the hotel,
but a smiley ‘Karibu!’ settled our nerves.
Our 5 days of In Country Orientation training prepared us
for the emotional transition of living in a different culture, taught us how to
integrate into our host community and extended our repertoire of energisers,
among other things. I think the most valuable aspect of the training was
getting to know the other volunteers and therefore forming good relationships
with each other, making the prospect of moving into a new community less
daunting!
So, having arrived on Thursday, we still haven’t completed
out In Community Orientation. We had the launch of the programme on Friday
afternoon, which made us all really excited to start our work, after hearing
the needs of our community from SAWAKA themselves. It was also a really good
opportunity to meet our peer educators –in community volunteers – and the other
staff at SAWAKA to find out how best to approach our placement.
Reproductive health education has occupied our last couple
of days, so we now have a seriously detailed knowledge on STIs, their
consequences and how to prevent them. Some points proved pretty controversial
and highlighted surprising cultural differences in attitudes towards sex and
sexuality. It was great to talk about those differences though; both parties
learnt a lot!
We now all feel ready to start our placements, having met
various community leaders and teachers, who have all been extremely positive
about our objectives, saying that ignorance on reproductive health is a problem
in Karagwe. My counterpart, Jackie, and I have been allocated Omurushaka, a
busy market town, to tackle. We are also working with another counterpart pair
in Nyakahanga to deliver sessions on Sexual Reproductive Health (SRH) in
schools and to youth groups in those communities.
After a meeting in Nyakahanga primary school this morning,
we have arranged to facilitate a session with the older pupils of the school on
Monday, which is very exciting! At the moment we’re slightly unsure as to how
it will run, as there are about 500 ‘older pupils’, and only 5 of us. Bear with
on that one…
We’ve also discovered that the church is the best way to
introduce oneself to a community, so Jackie and I are going to church in Omurushaka
this Sunday to make our faces and objectives known! The hope is that we’ll
identify some youth groups to target, too, as there are no schools in Om.
I’m sorry this blog is so long and info-packed. So much
changes in such a short space of time!
It’s World Aids Day on Sunday, so we are hoping to plan and run a
Community Action Day (CAD), as it is completely relevant to our work here!
I’ll tell all in the next post.
Laters! Badai!
