An update!

I have now experienced the worst that Tanzania has to offer: bad GI problems. I have been very ill for the past few days, but I am feeling slightly better today and made the trip into town. lots of things have been happening...we started orientation with our teaching partners and we have been splitting up into groups to present parts of the material. we have also been learning about the assessments that we will make in the villages when we first arrive. things like where the chiefs live, where the schools are and we will make a map to familiarize ourselves. we will also do random door to door assessment of the overall knowledge of HIV in the village by asking questions at random houses or huts in the village. we will also be finding out if any of the dukas (stores) sell condoms and how much they are so we can share this information when we do teachings.
The teaching partners (the tanzanian college students) are awesome and ready to help us with anything. my swahili is going slowly since i missed some classes because of my illness, but overall i think it will be fine. today i picked up my skirts at the tailors and they are so fantastic. i am hoping at some point to be able to take pictures and upload them. everything takes so much time though and the connection cuts out a lot. everyone in the group has bonded a lot and they are all so nice about asking me how i feel (why oh why did it have to be me????). today is the SIC BBQ at the office in town, one last get together before we move into the villages next week.
it is so fun to be in class and learning the material. it really is good that we are a solid representation of students and backgrounds in order to teach sexual transmission, since we will have to teach this information to high school aged teenagers and it is good to get all of the awkwardness out first so we can be straight forward and direct. talking about sex to teenagers is hard no matter the language and it is even harder when you are warning them about a life threatening illness. we also learned how a rapid HIV test works, the type that we are going to use in the village and encourage everyone to get if they have risky sexual behavior. we teach the ABCs: Abstinence, Be faithful, or use a Condom. it's really important that tanzanians get accurate information because they don't get sex ed like we do in high school.
also really great in orientation was a gender panel that we had. we split up the boys and the girls and talked about the parts of being female/male that we like/disliked and how roles are different or the same in tanzania and in the states or the uk. most girls stated that they disliked the double standard about girls not having as much freedom, and it is the same here. also in tanzania there is a bride price, in which the husband pays the family for his wife, so there is so risk of the tanzanian girl feeling like a comodity. also interesting to note was that it was cross cultural that the males feel more pressured to male money and have a lot of career goals. a lot of them said they were not praised for working with SIC as maybe their female counterparts were, since they should be making money this summer or perhaps working at something to further their post college career.

if any of you would like to get a cheap international phone card or check out this internet thing called skype that i heard of (it's suppose to be really cheap minutes) and want to call me, my cell number is (255) 787 532 173. incoming calls to me are free. remember that i am 10 hours ahead of PST.

Rachel

p.s. no internet for at least 2-3 weeks