Tough Questions

4 February 2010

Even though our week started out slow, it has turned out pretty good. The last two days we have done presentations at Sinon Secondary School that is a little South of Arusha in a rough neighborhood. The school wouldn’t let us present during the day so we have been getting there around 3pm and presenting until about 5:30pm. The fact that the students stay that late at school to listen to our presentation amazed me, let alone how interested they were the whole time we were presenting. At the end of the presentation today one boy raised his hand and said how happy he was that we had come and how much they all appreciated it. He said that they were so thankful three times in a row and everyone in the class was cheering and clapping. It is times like those that make the bad days here worth it.

During one of presentations at Sinon there was a young girl who sat in the front row and asked some interesting questions. Her first question was about we were doing as an organization to address homosexuality in Tanzania. We were a little taken aback by the question, but told her that we have not worked directly with the topic here because it is still not something that is received very well in Tanzania at this point in time. Later we were talking about the time period between when someone contracts HIV to when they will actually test positive, which can be several months, but she asked, “what are you as Americans doing for us to decrease the amount of time we have to wait for those results?” She also later asked a question about what America is doing to help AIDS orphans get access to formula. Not that those aren’t valid questions, but they are also problems that we have in America. I think it was her accusatory tone of voice that made America seem like the bad guy, and the laughing and clapping from other students during those questions, that are frustrating. (Most of the ARVs in Tanzania, which are free, are provided by EGPAF and USAID, both from America. It is not like there aren’t efforts being made to address the issue.) I guess I feel like we get so many mixed signals from people here about these issues. Sometimes I feel like they don’t even want us here, thinking that we work here out of pity for them…sometimes they accuse America of putting AIDS in condoms and other things, like biological warfare…and yet sometimes they ask questions about what America is doing to solve ALL of their problems, problems that we even still have in America. I can’t even count how many times we have gotten questions about how to prevent miscarriages, premature births, infertility and things that we still deal with in America, but it seems like they just have this picture in their minds that America is a place where everyone has everything they want and no one has any problems or worries in life. I know they hate hearing that sometimes there are no solutions to life problems, but sometimes I feel like they don’t always believe us…like they still think we are part of some big American conspiracy to make the lives of Africans as hard as possible.

On a lighter note, the best thing about work this week was that we hit the 2,000 mark for how many people we have presented to in Tanzania. We were pretty excited about that and are happy to have a “concrete” way to quantify the work that we have done here. (It also makes us feel less guilty about taking a few days off next week to go to Tarangire National Park to go on safari. We are really excited about it!)

(The picture today is of the warning label on our box of wine...pretty funny, but also true!)

Written by Whitney