Learning to swim in the deep end

Arriving in Tanzania as a volunteer i had no idea what to expect. We planned to work as part of a HIV/AIDS program, and had a vague idea about what that may involve. My ideas about HIV/AIDS was also vague. We assumed we would be given training of some sort. We were wrong.

The first two weeks were the hardest of the entire 3 months. We spent our first couple of nights making lesson plans for teaching orphan girls english and bluffed our way through it, making it up as we went, pretending we knew what we were doing.

Our introduction to Africa and HIV/AIDS was a series of home visits to patients living positive. One of the first people we met was a lady with leprosy and the last stages of AIDS. I had never seen someone so sick. She died a few weeks later. In those first weeks of 4-5 home visits a day we listened to peoples stories and heared about how they had become infected and their CD4 count. Welcome to Africa.

I don't think the people we worked with understood how different everything was for us in Africa. In other words they had never experienced culture shock. It was almost impossible to explain to them how different our home was from their home and their way of life. For example walking down the street they pointed to houses and asked us do we have houses like that in Australia? How do you explain that we dont live in small mud houses? And how do you begin to describe what it's like? Walking through the market one man pointed out different fruit and vegatables telling us the names of them and asking us if we had carrots in our country. He was suprised that we not only had carrots at home but we also had watermelons and tomatoes. Some women showed us how to clean rice and sift out the gravel and asked us how we clean our rice at home. We tried to explain that we buy our rice in packets at a store.
Everything is so different to what we knew that simple everyday things were just made harder. I think it took us the best part of 2 months for us to simply work out how things worked and the best way to contribute and how to actually be useful. i definately felt like we were thrown in the deep end in our first weeks as volunteers.

Since Emma and i volunteered with Tanzanian Millenium Hand Foundation (TAMIHA) and set up WALIPO, the CEO Crispin who we worked with has decided to take on more volunteers and organise it directly instead of going through the Green Foundation which the volunteer company ELI (Experential Learning International) set us up with. For more info. check out: www.tamiha.com. I've only just visited the new website myself and discovered that Emma and I feature quite a lot on the site!