(Disclaimer: This is long. I'm sorry. Read only if you love me/ are bored.)

The cockroaches are growing. At first, we had baby "mende" creeping onto the walls around dinnertime, just as dusk was turning to dark. Now, they crawl everywhere (even out of the choo) despite my roommate Alaina's deadly foot stompage. Mama and Janet laugh when we run and squeal or stay and squash. "No mende in Ulaya?" they ask. They still either think we're from Europe or that the US and Europe are the same country.

Mama also thinks I know every other mzungu in Arusha. When she picked me up from town last Saturday to come home early for the weekend, she assumed I knew the one blond girl on our dala dala. She urged me to say hello, but I abstained, being about three rows and a whole world of definite awkwardness away from this girl. I went home early so that I could a) experience a Swahili Catholic mass, and b) cook some good ol' American food for mama. The church service turned out to be five hours long and included three weddings and two first communions, in addition to a whole lot of gospel songs about Mungu, throughout the singing of which the older women interjected inspired banshee-like bursts.

Later that night, the other volunteers in my town (Olosiva) came home and Craig and I started cooking. We made a marinara sauce, that we all decided was worthy of repeating at home, with fresh tomatoes, crushed garlic, onions, and olives. We made about twice as much spaghetti as we needed, and a salad of the safe, peelable vegetables: carrots, cucumbers, avocado. Since Craig is very vocal about his obsession for beans ("I swear to God, I could eat them every meal and be happy for the rest of my life"), we wanted to make some too. We started too late, though, and only had time for lentils. We decided that lentils in butter garlic sauce sounded American/Italian enough, so we attempted them. The result: something resembling creamed corn. The best part? That disaster was mama's favorite part of the meal. Forget about the marinara sauce, forget about the salad ("I don't like them that way" were the first words out of her mouth when she saw the fresh veggies on the table) - mama was all about the butter garlic lentils on top of her spaghetti, which she dubbed "American ugali." (Ugali is a mix of hardened maize flour and water rolled up into little balls and eaten with absolutely everything.)

Sunday night planning opened a very very looong week. The week before we had dabbled in community assessment: that week, we rocked it. SIC started a secondary (only in name, not in time or effort) project of assessment this year where each group must map their community, assess condom availability, and interview sixty households in order to guage the community's knowledge of HIV. For the entire week, we were up and out by eight, trecking up and down our hilly town, sometimes up to our ankles in dust. We would have never been motivated to start if it had not been for Ferdas' industry. Our community of Olosiva, which is more like a suburb than a village, has six thousand households and four subvillages; in other words, it's huge. Ferdas, one of our Tanzanian teaching partners (an amazing asset to the program, who declined an offer from Harvard and is now the president of his class during the schoolyear - go figure) took it upon himself to break out his master cartography skills and create a detailed map of Olosiva, outlining assets such as water sources, meeting places, and churches. As the streets are unpaved and unnamed, Ferdas took the task of naming them; I am proud to say that there are now three Ruth Streets in NW Olosiva. With this motivation, we searched for every duka (corner shop selling everyday necessities) and assessed condom availability. Out of the 64 dukas we surveyed, over half carried condoms and supported sales to youth - score. Many of the people who don't currently sell condoms agreed to try it with our facilitation - score again. But of course, there were some who vehemently refused, citing Jesus as the reason and damning HIV as "a punishment from God." Fun times.

Though the condom availability was the most entertaining (allowing people to talk about tabboo subjects, confirming beliefs about crazy wazungu, and such), the household assessment was by far the most educational. We mostly spoke to young women, as most of the men were working in town at the early hour we set off from our toasty houses into the chill. Through a simple four-page survey, we found that most people in Olosiva think that condoms have holes and/or contain HIV. Most of the Maasai women were unsure of their ages and many were in polygamous marriages, as is tradition in more conservative circles. Most women stopped school after Standard 7, the equivalent of seventh grade, if not much earlier. A handful hadn't been to school at all and it wasn't uncommon to find a woman two years older than me already with three kids and set in her daily routine of washing, cooking, tending. It was so encouraging to hear that NO - mosquito bites don't transmit HIV and NO - people can't get HIV from sharing food with someone. When people went into detailed explanations of how they were sure people could get HIV from witchcraft or how you can see that condoms have worms when you expose it to sunlight (a misinterpretation of lubrication), it was a tad disheartening. People we spoke to were largely unaware of the family planning aspect of condoms, too, a fact which painfully came to mind whenever we were trailed by a hoard of unsupervised and half-dressed children. The final question in the survey was compound: first, how big of a problem is HIV in this community, and second, how big a role do the following problems play in HIV transmission. The answer for the gravity of HIV in Olosiva ranged from very small to very big, depending on the perspective of the interviewee. And every single person that we interviewed said that "lack of pocket money for girls" was a very big problem - something I wouldn't necessarily expect. When it came to the issue of "forced sex," however, almost everybody dismissed it as very small. I find this incorrect on so many levels, the most glaring being the fact that forced sex (aka rape in the non-euphemized world) is a huge problem worldwide, with rates of STIs, unwanted pregnancy, and HIV so obviously correlated. The next is that I find the necessity to engage in sex work to pay school fees, put food on the table, etc., (the consequences of "lack of pocket money for girls") a type of involuntary, or forced, sex. Yeesh. The survey, along with many of my experiences here, have really reinforced my belief in the importance of education and empowerment for young women of developing countries.

Switching gears, the classroom has been amazing. As a group, we teach two to four classes each weekday. In the morning, we have the Forms, high school-aged kids who participate as if their lives depended on it - and they very well may, considering the infection rate is 10% in this area of the country. In the afternoons, we teach Standards 4, 5, and 6. There are upwards of eighty or ninety children crammed into each class (quite standard in the more rural areas) and the classrooms only have bars on the windows. Much of our time is therefore spent competing with the rowdy children outside and the wind. Overall, our subjects (puberty, anatomy, HIV, etc.) are seen as a special treat by the kids, and they give us their attention, as undivided as it can be coming from ten year olds. Our time in the classroom gives us our daily dose of both laughs and frustrations, but it never fails to be rewarding. We'll be in our last class of the day, completely exhausted and trying to make it through until when we can all flop on the couch and eat, and then we hear the ABK (abstinence, be faithful, condoms) song floating through the air from the other end of the playground. Now THAT is the kind of thing that keeps us moving. We only have two weeks left, which is absolutely incredible, during which time we will be training our newly selected Peer Educators to continue education in the schools after we leave.

Today, we held our first official community teaching, where we split up the mamas and babas and taught the entire SIC curriculum, after a nice hour break of cooling our heels while we waited for people to actually show up. In the middle of a small grassy area that serves as the subvillage Ngidut's meeting place, Alaina, Ferdas, and I broke out our posters and taught to a group of 17 sheepish Maasai women. Sheepish, that is, until we gave condoms away after the demo - handfuls of both male and female condoms vanished before our eyes. Score.

Tomorrow morning, early, we're leaving to the mythical Zanzibar for a much-anticipated vacation. Nine of us are going for three nights and four days of Stonetown history, the apparently famous Zanzibar pizza, and beaches, beaches, beaches. I can't wait.

And PS: So much fun last night - there's a peanut butter factory across the street from my house here. Craig put up a video of us (very unsanitarily) tasting the peanut butter at different stages of production. This and more can be seen on his website. Thank you, Mr. Craig.

Love to all!