Everyday life in Africa with a host family

Saturday, 29.09.2018

It is the second day without electricity in the house, the third time this week that we only have potatoes for dinner and the fruit is gone again. It doesn't always feel welcoming.

I didn't come here with high expectations. I prepared for a very simple way of life and lack of luxury. These are all points that I can handle well.

We live here with Shedrack, Linda, and their now 12-week-old son. The house consists of two parts. The front part has a living room with a dining area, kitchen, and the bedrooms of the two of them, including a guest room. In the back of the house are the rooms of us volunteers.

I live in a 4-bed room, currently with two people, tomorrow with four.

To be honest, I'm not used to the lack of privacy anymore and there are moments when you just wish you could close the door behind you. However, it's also great to constantly have conversations and exchange ideas.

Fortunately, we currently get along well with each other! But there's nothing else we can do. Every person brings their own character and it's exciting to get to know the others and meet people here that I would never have met otherwise.

The shower sometimes works for 1-2 minutes with hot water, but mostly not. But I'm already used to taking cold showers. There are worse things.

The food..

I miss my family & friends very much.

But good food almost as much.

Going to the supermarket and choosing from a thousand things, baking something at home and eating an unpeeled apple.

Daydreams.

Here I really live by the motto:

'Peel it, boil it, cook it or forget it.'

We only have two gas hobs, unfortunately no oven.

Dishes are broken, the cutting board has fallen apart into two pieces, and spices are stored in old butter containers. These are simply not valued here.

The food here is very rich in carbohydrates. Everything that satiates a lot with a little. Mainly rice, beans, potatoes, and corn tortillas.

As for fruits & vegetables, we only have what can be harvested at the moment. Nothing is imported. However, the ecological and organic idea has not yet arrived here. Strong pesticides are used in the fields, which are banned in Germany. This is another reason to only eat tomatoes & Co peeled.

Fresh products can only be found at the market. There is one store with meat. Another one with drinks. Yet another market with spices.

Shopping here means taking a walk through the entire city. There is hardly any milk & dairy products here or you don't want to eat the products because often the refrigeration chain has been interrupted due to power outages.

We are so spoiled in Germany to just go to the supermarket, fill up the basket with everything we want, and then drive home comfortably by car.

The people here are not familiar with doing targeted sports, like jogging or similar. But they also move a lot more in their everyday lives and sometimes carry their groceries a long way to their villages. A car is really a luxury item.

All of these are just differences that you only feel when you live here, with the locals, and not as a tourist booking a hotel vacation.

Despite the many sacrifices, I enjoy getting to know the country in this way.

And strolling through the market and buying fresh fruits and vegetables, I now enjoy very much and will make it a habit to shop more consciously in Germany as well.

There is a big problem here in Tanzania, and it's called waste disposal and plastic usage.

It wasn't long ago that Germany started to reduce the use of plastic bags or even completely abandon plastic. The people here have never heard of that.

There is no recycling.

And in Iringa, there is no garbage collection either.

No trash cans here.

There is garbage everywhere in the city, a lot of plastic. People burn their trash in their gardens, nobody thinks about the fact that the resulting smoke might be unhealthy to breathe.

That's very hard for me to accept.

We all live together on one planet, but some countries are so far behind when it comes to ecological thinking and environmental friendliness, while other supposedly more natural countries without much technology and industry are so far behind in such matters.

It's strange.

In these areas, you can only be a pioneer and hope that they will come to the realization themselves that it's not good for the environment and therefore not for the people & animals.