Second post from Iringa

August 12

It's now two days into the workshop. It's not what I expected, but I'm dealing with it. Edson gave me the impression that the workshop would be in English but it's been about 80% Swahili at this point. I'm not angry, but I am a bit frustrated. After all, this is supposed to be a learning experience for the participants and the best way for that to happen is to conduct the workshop in their native language. I just feel a little useless at this point. Today I mostly sat around, listening when people were speaking English and trying to write my Fulbright essays when they weren't. During lunch, I chatted with a few of the other guests at our hotel and they were talking about all the neat sites around Iringa. Apparently there is a stone age settlement, good hiking and a game park near by. I feel a little let down that I'm stuck in a conference room all day when there are so many neat out-doors things to do in the area. I guess that's the nature of workshops: large numbers of people travel from their offices to an exotic locale and then spend all day inside.

Yesterday was more interesting. Edson had me leading two of the sessions, one on introducing governance and another on related themes. It was a little awkward. I would present a slide in English and then Edson would try to explain it in Swahili. Governance is a difficult topic in any language, but I feel we were getting through to people. Edson tries very hard to keep things participatory, so there were several small group exercises followed by a short presentation on each group's discussion. Honestly, it felt a lot like a class at Clark. I was nervous for about the first 5 minutes, but then I quickly got over it. I guess two years as a tour guide has done my public speaking skills some good.

I'm feeling a bit cooped up here. I'm used to being able to ride my bike around to blow off excess energy, but I don't feel safe leaving the hotel at night. I have a TV, but after 7pm all the channels are in Swahili which doesn't help my cabin fever at all. I borrowed a book from the Barkers', but I finished it on Sunday. Way to be unprepared for boredom. The book was The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman. It's an ethnography and a good part of the book details the authors own experiences with researching Hmong immigrants. I feel like I'm totally up to writing a book about my own insecurities and mishaps, so maybe this Anthropology thing isn't so hard...

...

It turns out I spoke (wrote?) too soon. Rama came back after dropping people off at their hotels and took me to an internet cafe. As soon as he drove off, the place started having electrical problems and I had to sit and wait for half an hour before he came back. A couple of other people from the workshop happened to be near by, and we all piled into the landrover and drove around looking for another cafe that was open at 7:30pm. Iringa is a small, rural city and places tend to close soon after sunset. The place we finally found had a slow connection (that's where I made the short update), but I was able to check my email and read up on the news, etc. Afterward, Rama, myself and one of the other facilitators, Makame, stopped by the Miami Bar for dinner. The name made me crack up, but the food was good and cheap. We had nyama choma, which I think just means 'grilled meat' and grilled green bananas. Now, I know you're imagining grilling the bananas you buy in a US supermarket, but that's not this kind of banana. They're definitely bananas and not plantains, but they're cooked while still green. It kind of tastes like a bland potato, but was ok when when dipped in hot pepper vinegar. The kuku (local chicken) was tasty, but also probably the toughest meat I've ever had. You really had to chew the stuff to get it down. That's the trade-off here: food looks ugly and is hard to chew, but it is certainly a heck of a lot tastier than the soft, nice looking food in the States. Go figure.