An Update!

        One of my avid readers suggested I complement my introspective posts with a quick update in conversational Grace tone about all the spectacular things I have gotten to do in Zanzibar thus far. I thought that idea seemed reasonable enough, so here it goes! (sidenote: if you are friends with me on facebook, chances are you have already seen most of these pictures, but now you can read the descriptions that go with them!)

     

       

The following is a rooftop view from the guest house the entire group stayed the first four or five nights after arriving in Zanzibar, it is called Garden Lodge. Through out or trip, we will be spending nights at Garden Lodge here and there periodically. There are many times we are scheduled to travel out of Stonetown for a week or so, return for a night or two, then depart again! For each night we stayed there we got to enjoy a lovely rooftop breakfast around 7 am in the morning, so these photos were taken about an hour after the sun rose. Having the entire group together for the first week and a half was a great bonding experience. Prior to arriving, I thought we would go straight into our homestays. Now, I have lived in my homestay for a week and I can retrospectively say how thankful I am that we all got to go experience the initial culture shock together, orient ourselves to our new African lifestyle as a group and get to feel each other out a bit before our academics became super involved.

     
  Our class schedule is ever-changing due to the fact that most of our field work depends on the tides. But typically we begin at 8 am with a 2 hour Swahili course. Immediately after our lesson we walk to the Institute of Marine Sciences for a lecture; everyday the topic changes. My favorite so far has been about water pollution and waste management, generally and specific to Zanzibar. When the speaker is finished we get a 2 hour lunch break, which is a complete necessity because we usually spend about an hour of it lost or asking people directions. (LOL) When we get back to our headquarters we have a guest lecturer. These lectures have seemingly been more about familiarizing us with Zanzibar than specific to marine life, which is totally important and a nice break from Science-y things. I was extremely worried I would not be able to keep up with the academics here since it is an upper-level science program and almost everyone else is an environmental science or biology of some sort major, but I can proudly say it has not yet been a problem for me! :] (knock on wood) Anyway, after the lecture we have another 2 hours of Swahili, so our usual school day has proven to be like a full time job, 8 to 5 everyday that is. And I am not kidding when I say everyday, we do not get weekends off! Our first free day is February 29^th, I believe, and if I am correct I have a theory that we only have that day free because they forgot it was a leap year and did not plan anything for it!!

     

  These pictures are from a town on the East Coast called Paje, and its surrounding villages. To bring our orientation week to an end we headed to Paje. The goal of this was to expand our understanding of Zanzibar as a whole and to explore the various effects of tourism and visit a couple conservation areas. Zala Park, also known as Snake Park, is a zoo, for strong lack of a better word, that was started by an environmental education teacher to educate school children and townsfolk about their natural environment. Although it is an area dedicated to both plants and animals, I found the animals much more fascinating. Most of the enclosures he’d built housed animals that were at risk of becoming endangered, mostly due to superstition and folklore deeming them negative. The animal that stuck out to me most were land crabs, for 2 reasons. The first being how much of a nuisance people consider them to be in the Keys. I don’t know if they are considered to be over populated there, but there certainly is not a deficit. The 2^nd is the reason behind their endangerment. The townspeople believe that if you find one in your house you will soon become divorced, and if you are the spouse that finds it, it represents your being the one to cause the marriage ending chaos.

     The day we left Paje, we woke up at 4:45 to go to a town called Kizimkazi, specifically to Menai Bay to go to a "live" fish auction (i say live like that because all the fish were dead, clearly) and dolphin watching. Boy was dolphin watching something else. I was extremely curious about how it would actually go down, after they described what we'd be doing; which was looking for the pods then jumping out of the boats when we got close to them. Having previous experience with dolphin behavior I did not think this plan would be as good as it sounded and sure enough it was not. Our teachers clearly knew this and were in part, trying to demonstrate to us the way the tourism industry in the area functions. Above are pictures of the fish auction! 

    On our drive home we stopped by the Zanzibar Butterfly Center. It was basically like an aviary for butterflies and was purposed to help conserve butterflies in the surrounding area. With over 200 new butterflies hatching each week, I deemed them to be doing a phenomenal job at that! While the netted area was not that big, it contained an astounding amount of beauty. I was lucky enough to have a monarch land on my hand, as you can see below! 

    

     After Paje, we stayed in Garden Lodge for two additional nights preparing to be born into our new Zanzibari families!!! (aka moving into a homestay) Now we all have a Swahili birthday of February 7th, those of you who know me know I have loving reasons to celebrate so I was over joyed about this! My family is formed by Mama Talha, her husband Issa, and my two little brothers named Nasso and Muhammad, and now me :] The house part of our home is located on the third floor of our building. The first floor houses the shop that my Dads half of the family owns, they sell jewelry and fancy furniture, such as gold plated chests. My Dad (with help, I believe) makes the products while his sisters are the face of the shop. The second floor is a workshop where said things are made! The home is beautiful, but does not resemble an American home whatsoever. It is not fully enclosed, there is a big open sitting room that funnels into the kitchen, but other than that every room is concealed with big, beautiful, double wooden doors. There also is not a table, we eat every meal on the floor using our hands! This took some getting used to at first, especially when consuming foods that were soupy, but now it feels really odd to use utensils. (We use spoons to eat ice cream.) I have my own room which is super nice and sometimes makes me feel like an island princess. (hehe) You can see it pictured below! I do not have any photos with any of my family members yet, but once I do I will definitely upload them! They are a beautiful family. 

     Living in a homestay has been a complete 180 of what I imagined, but it has been very rewarding and a remarkable experience that I wouldn't trade for the world, nonetheless. I must admit, the first night and following day, were very hard for me and shifted my mindset to a somewhat odd and unfamiliar state. The following were the influencing factors: To begin with, the entire time we have been here there has been a list posted on the main bulletin board in the SIT Office with each students name, their Zanzibar phone number, the address of their homestay, and the name of their host mom. In Swahili, the word Bi is similar to madam and can denote age, as well as status in some cases. 5/6 of us had moms whose names began with Bi, mine did not. This fact, in combination with hearing the stories of my cousin Jordan's SIT homestay mom, and all the other students speculating about what my Mom would be like led me to believe that my mom would be some young single woman who was ready to take the town with me! We were also oriented to our homestay life would with the knowledge that some Moms would speak perfect English while some Moms would not speak any. I was second to last to be picked up from our headquarters but every woman that had come in to claim a child before I left had spoken perfect, or very close to perfect English. My mom barely speaks any English. So after my first day completely misaligning with my expectations, I was definitely offset a bit.

     I have now lived here for a week and I can not imagine leaving! Last night, my Mom told me I was her best friend. She has proven to me that even though language can, at times, be a barrier to connection, there are a multitude of ways to build bonds and form relationships with people. Everyday I come home and tell her about my day using as much Swahili as I can muster, filling the gaps with actions and English when necessary; pictures from the day, old pictures of friends from home with stories behind them, and my favorite American music have also been go-to's for helping us get to know each other. We also spend a considerable amount of time teaching each other our respective languages, and she uses the index cards I made to study Swahili, to study English. My brothers are 2 and 6, so as long as I'm willing to play with them all night long, they don't really mind that I can't fully understand what they're saying. Right now, Muhammad, the youngest one is very sick with the flu, but Mama Talha lets me help take care of him and there is no better feeling than making him smile when all he's been doing for the past hour is crying. I genuinely look forward to coming home after class and spending time with them each day, and although my homestay is not what I expected nor is it always the easiest, it has been a priceless experience thus far. 

     Above are all the biggest updates, but each day here is truly an adventure and I learn hand-fulls of new things by the hour. I can not reiterate enough how grateful I am for the opportunity to be on this once in a lifetime trip. Below are some underwater pictures from an unprotected reef off the coast of Stonetown called Bawe. Although having class everyday of the week can be quite strenuous, doing things like this makes it totally worth it! I hope you enjoyed my update, but get ready for another thought provoking post, cuz' I've got one a brewin'! 

                                               ~Until Next Time, My Friends~

Hakuna Matata

My original vision of keeping this blog was that it would be a slight variation of a diary, less personal of course, but I had planned to essentially compose posts that were in a list-like format of what I had done that day/week/what have you. I have only spent six days here so far, but in that short time it has already become extremely clear to me that I have much more insight to offer through this blog than a fun-to-read list.

            So far the goal of most of the discussions we have had and activities we have done is to get us oriented to living a Zanzibarian lifestyle. Here is a short list of the things most prominent in my mind that feel like entirely new experiences: a traditional, but delicious, dinner at a remarkable lady named Mama Abla’s house (and almost all the other food we have eaten); yesterday, we were split into groups and each group was lead to a different area of town where our instructors left us with a list of tasks to be completed, and afterwards having to find our way back to our headquarters; intensive Swahili lessons, and driving through the rural areas surrounding Stonetown. I should also mention that until today we have been staying in Stonetown. Traveling to Paje today, a smaller, more rural town on the East Coast of Zanzibar, was our first introduction to the rural parts of the island, and I must say they are quite a sight.

            Although I could tell you many great things about all of the above, I have chosen to focus on the element that has been stirring my emotions and shifting my thoughts and perspectives the most. As some of you may know, when I was in high school I pursued a quest to become fluent in both Spanish and French. Career plans I had were heavily based on the language skills I had acquired at that point. I also planned on studying in Paris for a semester in college. However on a somewhat rebellious quest to discover my “true passions” I lost all of my lingual skills as well as the compulsion I once felt for becoming tri-lingual. Introduction to Swahili, in a sense, has re-awoken that intrigue. For that, I am very thankful. I enjoyed learning language so much because I had a gift or knack for them you could say, they came easily to me. But school is school and the rebellious phase I previously mentioned caused me to feel disdain towards anything anyone who was in a position of authority told me to do. I can not honestly say I regret bringing my studies of these languages to an end, but now I can retroactively see the ways in which continuing them could have been beneficial to me. I have become hyper-sensitive to the enormous capacity language has to act as a bridge, to break down walls, to become keys to open doors, and to create doors you could not have previously been aware existed.

            All that being noted, what has been the most thought provoking to me is the way our lessons began. Granted all of what I am about to say could simply be a product of our course being an intensive language course, or due to the fact that in 3 days we will be placed in a family and need to know the most basic of basic communication skills to keep from becoming socially isolated; but nonetheless it has made a profound impact on my views towards this culture, my culture, and Western culture in general.

            Our first lesson we were, what felt like, bombarded with the wide array of greetings used in the Swahili language; more importantly, but unbeknownst to us at the time, in Kiswahili culture. The importance of greetings can be found through tradition and longstanding culture, so our “walimu” said, but the explanation given to us about why greeting people here is such a necessity is beautifully simple. When you greet some one, fundamentally what you are doing is acknowledging their presence, vocalizing that you know they are there and that in some way or another their presence is important to you.  

Here is a practical application to demonstrate this point: You are walking to the market and on the way you pass by many shops, some may house storeowners who are preoccupied with customers, others have people just sitting around but you walk by all of them without a word. You take a wrong turn and after a couple minutes of walking you realize you have gone the wrong way and are not headed toward the market. You decide to retrace your steps and when you arrive back at the familiar stores you had already passed, you see numerous shops with people in them who appear to not be busy. So, you ask them for assistance to your final destination. In Zanzibar, the streets are not like streets in the states. They are narrow winding alleyways between buildings and churches and are very easy to get lost quickly in. This, for one of many reasons, is why people do not tell you directions. Instead they will walk you or find some one else heading that way to walk you where you need to go. But why should some one give you their time, if you could not even give a little bit of yours to acknowledge they were there?  It may seem silly at first, but with deeper thought this unspoken required balance/way of interacting is very reasonable and may explain on some level, the willingness of people to do things for you in your own culture.

Greetings we learned were phrases we would consider in the states to be small talk. We learned to ask people how they were, how their parents were, how they slept the night before, how the last meal they had eaten was, etc. All of these questions begin with the word “habari” meaning what is the news? So direct translations come out to be questions like “what is the news about you?” somewhat equivalent to the way we would ask “how are you?” Consequently, the norm is to answer any question beginning with “habari” is to say “nzuri,” meaning good. In the words of our intelligent Bi Asia, “If some one asks you “habari” and you are about to drop dead, you answer with “nzuri” and then you can die.” The time I have spent here so far seems to reflect that this is a widespread and deeply ingrained mindset in most Zanzibari people. That is, even if something bad is happening life is still good.

            Our next couple lessons were filled with vocabulary to teach us how to tell people our names, where we were from, where we were staying currently and to ask of them the same. It was not until our fourth or fifth lesson that we started learning possessive pronouns and verb conjugations, grammar and structure. But right now, in Swahili I could tell you where I am going, where my friends are staying, that I will help my mother with house work when I am home from school, what the teacher tried to cook for dinner last night, even so we still have not learned to verb to have nor has it come up in any of our exercises. Initial instruction in the other languages I took immediately delved into learning to talk about what we have and placed the utmost importance on writing and saying everything correctly, even if it meant sacrificing the ability to form some sort of a relationship. Grammar and structure seemed to be far more important to learn than how to carry on a simple two or three minute conversation with some one.

            In my opinion, the order of what we are learning in Kiswahilil speaks immensely about the values of the people here, and vice versa for the Western values. The way in which the language has been taught to us seems to dictate that the ability to form relationships with others is priceless compared to anything else. I will leave my explanations of learning European languages and my opinions about Western culture up for interpretation.  I must reiterate that all of this could be the function of something completely different than the culture and its values and all the above could be a bunch of bologna. Either way, it is something interesting to ponder :]

~Until Next Time~