with all the grimness of what we've been looking at, our director pointed out an interesting observation- the programs to address aids- developing economic oportunities for women, bio-intensive agriculture, examining the male - female power dynamic especially within marriage, protection and education/economic oportunities for at risk children- these are all positive developments for society. she pointed out that aids may give africa another chance to look at gender relations/dynamics, shine light on what has been a source of suffering prior to aids, and maybe force some change that otherwise wouldn't occur.
i'd say more about the delights of living in arusha, hmmm. people greet me like their long lost neice, even if it's a begger i am walking by that i haven't got it together to find my small change to contribute. the other day someone greeted me who had been on the bus i was on in march that got stuck for a day and a half in the mud- . last night i ate dinner with a local friend at an indian barbeque place- tables open to the street- you pick your skewer/ shish-kabob and then choose from an array of about 20 different curry vegetable/pickle dishes, laid out like a salad bar, all you can eat- . some kids accross the street were dancing to bongo-flava, the swahili hip hop- and the scene on the street was so laid back and amenable. i thought i was taking a little bit of a digestive risk, but suffered no back-lash. we usually take taxi's to get around after dark but downtown feels safe.- where we are staying is a bit in the outskirts- accross a bridge notorious for after dark theives. our place is set back in a courtyard. it is a hostel and also a school- run by catholic nuns. after 11 they let out a pack of vicious sounding dogs to guard the grounds, so you don't venture out unless you call the guard on duty to your side first. tonight we plan to venture out as a group onto the local nightlife. i cought a little of it last week- every thurs. night there's live music at a place near by- last week it was supposedly open mike, but dominated by one band that was very together, professional sounding local traditional flavor- no cover at that place, but you pay a dollar fifty rather than a dollar for your beer. arusha is known to be a very expensive place generally for locals. there's also a fancy hotel nearby which i was unaware of when i was here in march. there, for a hefty 2 dollars, you can get an excellent expresso/cappucino- feels obscene to pay more than what could give a couple of people a decent dinner, but every so often-

we've now moved from training on aids to training on nutrition, and then next week we'll go out with our local counterpart and conduct 5 hour trainings....
i had finally a moment of scepticism this past week. we were listening to a visiting speaker who works with Pathways providing palliative care and home health and hospice services. he spoke so passionately about the care they deliver i was actually moved to tears, as was another of my classmates who'd lost an aunt to aids a couple of years ago. he looked at us very compassionately and gravely and said something like, 'and sometimes, the patient will die'- all of the sudden i felt like i was back in the gw hospital he reminded me of one of the doctors. anyways it is amazing the level of in home care he descibed= training family and community members how to care for the patient so they can be cared for at home- providing 32 day trainings to them on all aspects, plus sending in supervisors to make sure all's well; counselors to help them handle the grief, having a contact person assigned to them at the hospital so they can access expert care immidiately at any time- i was thinking gee whiz we should have been living in africa.... but then at the very end when asked what are the challenges they face it began to seem like all of that is the ideal of what happens, far removed from what happens in practice.
the next day we were visited by nuns who run an amazing counseling service- counseling and encouraging people to get hiv testing, and also caring for and trying to raise money for schooling for the outrageously ballooning number of orphans due to hiv here- i read in one of my papers orphans due to aids in africa account for 80 percent of orphans worldwide- can that be true? in anycase it's a huge problem that the tanzania govt. is not yet talking much about let alone dealing with and these nuns are doing an amazing service- also helping provide food to a lot of communities who've been hit by aids and are going hungry. they spoke for the first 45 minutes on how they counsel people. only listen, never be shocked by what the client tells you, never judge, never advise, offer empathy not sympathy and so forth. i was truly inspired. then a question of condoms came up- and we heard, ' they shouldn't use them because in that case the person is walking away from the light. the women who use them lead to prostitution. they are unreliable anyway because they come at such a range of prices so they probably don't all really work. " someone asked about the situation we have been discussing this week that affects a huge number of women in africa. what about the woman who is married with children, and her husband works far from home. she's quite sure he has girlfriends and likely doesn't use condoms. She has zero leverage to negotiate with her husband to use condoms with her, because there is the attitude that if a woman shows interest in condoms she's a prostitute. actually a woman i know here is in this situation. she's never been tested. i was encouraging her to get a test. she said she couldn't because if she was positive, her husband would likely leave her, even though it would have come from him. he would probably be in denial and not get tested himself. even if she tested negative she would have to keep putting herself at risk with her husband because it is impossible for her to discuss sex with her husband, and even the mention of a condom can lead the husband to accuse the wife of having affairs, and possibly kick her out. it's a very common situation. and a huge disincentive for a wife to get tested. it is ironically a disease mostly affecting women in africa, and yet the women are in such a compromised position to do anything about it. another factor we learned is that women are generally much more vulnerable to stds. and a woman with an std the involves any sort of skin sores is 4 times more at risk for aids. So this has all been a pretty heavy topic this week. we heard from a massai woman who has a women's organization for the massai who was very interesting also. there are so many factors to reckon with when attempting to diseminate info. for one there are age sets here- the massai but also many other tribes here have the boys go through puberty rituals with all the other boys their age, they are an 'age-set' and there are leaders among them. if you go to a community and try to hold a general info. session you may get nowhere. first you get invited, then the age set leaders decide who you should talk to, and so forth. but back to the nun, that wasn't the question someone asked her. rather a classmate who is also a catholic, from mozambique asked what about the situation of a husband who know's he's hiv + and he wants to protect his wife and family, but continue in the marraige- what about condom use for him?- she asked because she said another rule for catholics is to protect your family above all else. the question's answer wandered off into any topic except the actual question. we didn't push it too much- the nun was a saint with the work she is doing, and yet the condom thing...
the bio-intensive farming has certainly been the most hopeful segment of our work thus far- another interesting point the massai woman brought up was that if presenters go into the massai communities with a package talk, they'll listen politely but dismiss it as something to do with the outside world and not them- if they are to take any of it seriously they have to be a part of the conversation from the very begining- it can't just be a delivered lecture- it has to be a conversation which they can own as their own.
next week we're going out to do our nutrition etc. trainings in the villages and we've been instructed to bring soda, white bread and peanut butter to offer a lunch! i couldn't believe it! but the trainings are a bit of a give and take i guess- some incentive along with the info-

continuing to have interesting trainings on aids, with all sorts of local presenters offering great insider perspectives

i didn't intend to sound too enthusiastic too soon about this program, but the discussion on aids was interesting, with our local counterparts having plenty to add from their life experiences. and the bio-intensive aggriculture program has so far been great. our group is paired off, with one american paired with the woman from mozambique, one paired with the woman from lesotho, myself paired with a tanzanian guy in the sustainable ag. program, and the ethiopian american paired with a guy from ethiopia- after these three weeks of training the mozambique pair will set up trainings -training trainers- in mozambique for the year, the lesotho pair in lesotho ( tiny country surrounded by south africa), the ethiopian guy in ethiopia, and the ethiopian american and myself will stay here in the arusha area- my focus will be the sustainable ag. program, and the guy i'm paired with, placid, will be my partner in trainings- my understanding is that i'll be going out into the field with the three tanzanian sustainable agriculture experts accompanying them in their trainings with the farmer groups- (who are often mostly women). placid and i may also be conducting basic trainings, follow up visits, info. gathering- but mainly my role is to help oversee the program -help with its strategic planning, and see that some of the office's goals are getting carried out in the field. the tanzanian experts have been our teachers this past week and they are great teachers, very knowledgeable, and extremely progressive in their thinking. the farmers are aparently very eager and grateful for the trainings. as it is they have been tilling the same surface soil and depleting it for years- so these techniques help them bring new life to their soil, crops, selves-
our teacher says these were old practices that everyone used to know until the 'green revolution' with fertilizers, pesticides, etc came in, and now most have lost touch with these techniques. our ethiopian guy is sceptical that it will work for vast tracts of land due to the labor intensiveness- he asks some good questions. nevertheless even he is largely impressed. following a day or so of class we actually conduct the work we've been learning about- making the compost, digging the beds, and then we've traveled into the countryside visiting farmers who have adopted the techniques. another advantage of the technique is that you grow many times more on the same size of land, and it takes only a fraction of the water- water collection and irrigation techniques are included- so i don't know- so far i'm so impressed- what a great training to be in this mixed group and have excellent class teaching followed immediately by putting it into practice followed immediately by visiting those who've been practicing it- i have heard that the bio-ag. program lacks organization and hints that i will have a big job on my hands in trying to help iron out the kinks.
our director as i said is an african american woman who gave up her medical practice in california to come run this program, working for much the same compensation as the rest of us- obviously its an act of love for her and she is doing everything to make sure we're getting every oportunity for training- goes out of her way. the other day we were supposed to have a rare afternoon off- instead our director, deborah, squeezed in a trip to a natural medicine establishment where they have a garden growing all sorts of local medicinal herbs, practice reflexology and massage and i think also acupuncture- they offer an herbal medicine training there which i will probably take at some point.
Our living situation has grown more extreme as we are all sharing one hot shower and one sink- and have several others besides us also competing for the facilities! i'm not sure why we are being quite this economical as it would only put them out about $5 a night to give us each a private room- but it has been a great bonding element-soon we're supposed to get a bit more space-
as good as the program and participants is, i will say i miss my independence! i am the one who on occasion defers the group plan, as all this togetherness is a bit of a shock to the system- it is certainly giving up the control over schedule and planning that i'm used to- so i miss a bit my previous trip where i was randomly meeting all sorts of interesting people and encountering surprising situations- it's a stretch in that regard, but the advantages are great- getting to see things, meet people, hopefully have some sort of a positive impact that i would otherwise never do.
the underlying thing is that i just love being in tanzania- love the environment, the people, swahili, even the food, while i maybe don't love it, is perfectly healthy and tasty- and the views of mount meru and mount kilimanjaro are great. it is weird in arusha with all the tourism and economic polarities- muzungu walking around shelling out hundreds for safaris walking alongside people living on under a dollar a day- there's tensions between the tanzanians who've come into money working ie. for the war crime tribunals, and the one's who are on a more typical tanzanian economy too. such beautiful people on the whole here though. i also love the corn being grilled on little fires everywhere- a cob of hot fresh corn off the grill for 10 cents.

so it's 8:30 am now and i am sneaking in a bit of internet prior to our 9:00 start- very busy schedule here right off the bat- here's our focus so far:
our first day was devoted to the situation of AIDS in africa. how initial approaches, presuming the aids epedemic in africa is due to promiscuity and lack of basic awareness, emphasize abstinence and if more progressive, condom use-
our discussion was about the economic factors that put so many women and children in particular in environments where they are at risk of contracting aids, and nutritional factors that make people likely to contract once exposed and likely to have a rapid onset- the cycle of poverty and aids that make aids so epidemic in a place like africa. so i guess it's a difference between looking only at the actual act through which people catch aids, assuming that it is a matter of choice, and an approach that looks at the context- why are people sexually exposed, why once exposed are they so likely to contract the disease, why it progresses so quickly-.
For example in poverty with limited nutrition the immune system starts out weakened, so the virus is much more easily spread - if a woman's husband dies of aids she may lose rights to property, nutrition further declines, and may resort to prostitution to support her family- further increasing her risks. similarily the many orphans that have resulted from the epidemic are starting from a weakened immune system and are vulnerable to sexual exploitation or contracting for sex to support themselves.
More appropriate approaches to the epidemic continue to train in basic awareness of the disease, how it's spread, and how to avoid it, but also are economic/nutrition based- giving widows means of livelyhood, orphans adequate protection/nutrition, and tactics such as bio-intensive farming. the latter has been our focus for the past couple of days.
bio intensive farming is a kind of organic farming that uses compost and raised beds - it is labor intensive at first with a lot of work going into making the compost and triple digging the earth, rotating it with the compost, raising up beds so that you create healthy soil and more surface area for planting- but the payoff is multiplied output on the same tract of land, healthy soil producing more nutritious crops, and no need for the expense and side effects of chemical fertilizers or pestisides.
we have been out at a neighboring village which has an agricultural school, demo garden, and the head of the school heads our sustainable ag. program. we spent a morning making a compost heap and a day today making a raised bed-

gravity

for some reason i have come to tanzania for the year with my mp3 player loaded mostly with the Handsome Family, an alt-country band that Nate used to love- they're country by sound but their lyrics aren't-here's one song:
there's a blind man
who hears angels
he hears them whispering inside potatoes
and from the curling leaves of blooming plants
and in the winding tracks of crawling ants
He stands ouside under the sky
listening to starlight drifting by
because gravity
is not the only
force at work
in this world

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I'm here with five other women all taking a month training all living in one dorm room sharing two bathrooms- one''s from mozambique, one from lesotho s.africa, one latina american from dc, one ethiopian american from seattle, and one other american from n.carolina- we're headed by an african american woman from san fransisco who left her medical practice to come run this program in tanzania- it's a great group- as much as i abhor being encased in a group esp. in the 3rd world, i like this group.