Peace Corps Week (is EVERY week)

“Peace Corps Week” was the first week of March, when I wrote this post.  I realized, in the course of jotting my activities down, that Peace Corps Week is every week.  The experiences of this week are similar to my experiences every week, and define my service.  I don’t always have the time, energy, or mental clarity to write them down. But, here are highlights of the abundant joys and appalling challenges I faced in one typical week of service:

Sunday, March 1: Kilimanjaro Marathon Day!

Many of my friends and fellow volunteers came from across the country to run, whether 42 K, 21 K, or 5 K (like myself).  Peace Corps Volunteers show determination in so many parts of life apart from their service!

Some of the PCVs and myself on race day

Monday, March 2: Strugglebus

Stayed in town for an extra night to try to unconfiscate my confiscated American ATM card from a local bank.  I had used it in attempt to receive a gift to our school from my parents.  Turned out the card got returned to America.  Hurried back from town to my village school, thinking only #HakunaMatata

Tuesday, March 3: Hope

Had a meeting with one of our top Form 4 girls about the Africa’s Tomorrow Scholarship: an opportunity for a low-income girl to attend college in America.  We are both eager to see if this will pan out!

Wednesday, March 4: “Usiwapige Wanafunzi Wangu!” (Do NOT beat my students!)

The new teacher at our school used a TREE BRANCH to beat three Form 3 students. The diameter (I measured one of two pieces that broke and flew off before I could leave the room) was 3 cm.  I rarely speak my mind during our lunch meetings, but I had plenty to say today, armed with a “real-size” drawing I had one of the students draw.

Thursday, March 5: Building windows skyward to success

Our first successful meeting of Skylights Writing Club (a storybook and creative writing club started by another teacher and myself).  Each week we had tried to hold a meeting previously, some last-minute change in the school timetable forced us to cancel the meeting at the last minute.  We read one of Aesop’s fables about an ass and a load of salt, and our students wrote and illustrated their own fable about an elephant and a monkey. Kudos to them!

Friday, March 6: Scariest day of service to date

When I teach a period directly before lunch, I know that students will surely be sleeping.  Today was no different – except it was.  Maria, a Form 4 student who is not particularly bright or hardworking, but always sweet, had her head on the desk for half of the period, and would not respond to any of my questions.  I shrugged it off, anxious to attend to the rest of my class, and tired from a difficult week of teaching.  Making my way to the dining hall later, I saw a small group of these students clustered around a student lying on the grass.  It was Maria, lying unconscious on the grass.  The following hours were terrifying for me, as someone who understands Western medicine enough to know that something is gravely wrong, but not well enough to properly know what to do in a village where the idea of calling a doctor to come attend to a patient is actually laughable.  I learned more in the weeks to come about this recurring problem in Maria’s four years at school.  Without getting into great detail, this encounter, along with several others, both strengthens my interest in and fosters doubt about Western medicine.  After strong efforts of insisting and begging that she be taken to the hospital, we finally carried her unconscious body into the school car, and waved it off.  When the car faded off into a cloud of dust, some of my students braved the climb along our village road to our village shop to buy kilos and kilos of flour and sugar to prepare a cake for our International Women’s Day Celebration

Saturday, March 7: Full day fire-side

After returning from a morning of marketing, four of my students and myself began preparing the large cake for tomorrow’s event.  We started cooking at 10 am, creaming butter and sugar with a wooden spoon in my huge black basin, and pouring the cake batter in elephant-sized cooking pots over firewood.  By the time we put the finishing touches on our titanic work of art, it was just shy of midnight!

Some of the cooks with our final product!
The drawings and decorations
all compliments of my students.

Sunday, March 8: International Women’s Day!

Time was tight this day, and I saved time by attending our own Lutheran church service at school, instead of making the long weekly climb to our Catholic church.  It was a beautiful, energized, and joyful service full of dancing and performances.

Plans for the day were all on cue – decorations, music, cake, performers, and MCs.  A familiar beat pulsed through the hall, and the girls line-danced in, each one sporting a beaming smile and a pink tissue-paper flower that the boys had spent time making.  We rarely go a day without losing power, and I knew that our electricity would surely cut just as soon as we started.

Sure enough, just when our student MC welcomed a laughing, beaming group of youth, the microphones, speakers, and projector that we had carefully arranged abruptly cut.  After our usual scrambling to find fuel for our generator (which I had been ensured would be filled in case of a power cut), we managed to begin the event again.  It went miraculously smoothly.

"House of Talent:" a mother going into labor while working hard in the fields.

Students were attentive to the student-led presentations and songs.  Our school “House of Talent” put on an absolutely wonderful Swahili play depicting the challenges of women in Tanzania. The consequences of domestic maltreatment, early pregnancy, low expectations, and objectification of women were shown more clearly than I could have ever demonstrated in a classroom.  Roaring laughter alternated stoic pauses when the entire room of 350 young men and women re-visited some hard truths.  The students, with minimal help from me and another teacher, had planned and practiced a brilliant play.  I was already on Cloud 9 halfway through our event.

"House of Talent:" the consequences of early pregnancy.
This teenage mother will not wake up.

Students listened attentively to a video speech I filmed from one of our most successful village girls, as they did to a presentation I gave about Malala Yousafzai, one of the most inspiring and incredible age-mates of theirs.

Giving a presentation about Malala Yousafzai, one of my personal heroes.

For our final activity, girls left the boys behind to participate in a global movement called “Join Me on the Bridge.”  The Join Me on the Bridge campaign started in 2010 when women from Congo and Rwanda joined together on the bridge connecting their two countries, showing that they could build the bridges of peace and hope for the future.  Uroki women, at first, complained that we had to walk on our parched, dusty, bumpy village road, down the mountain to the river, while the boys stayed and danced to music.  However, within less than a minute, they realized that they had the freedom to dance and sing because of the empowerment of the day.  For the rest of our way down, and the strenuous climb back up, there was chanting and dancing that could be heart throughout the village – “Wanawake JUU! Wanawake JUU! Madam Carol JUU!  Wanawake JUU!” (Women RISE!)

Join Me on the Bridge: "Wanawake JUU!"

The best part of the day was when one of my sweet Form 4 girls, Glory, said, “Madam – you make us happy!”  I could see the joy radiating from her heart.  A Form 2 student, Beatrice, pressed a handmade card into my hand, along with a small lollipop.  I finally had time to unfold the two sheets late that night.  Amid whimsical cartoon drawings, was an acrostic poem about MISS CARO.  It read, “Mother is Someone Special, Coulors Around Rimble bright Over.” The main message read, “Your special because your so kind to every one, your so faithfull, you always care every one, that’s why your special.”  Beatrice’s words, in their imperfect English, were perfect to me, and brought me to tears after an inspiring, wonderful day.

Tears of raw human emotion – the full spectrum – are a regular part of Peace Corps service, and this “Peace Corps” weeks represents many of the weeks of my service.