Tanzania, where old is new again

A major thing that I have learned about Africans in general lately is that everything is used. You can buy anything used, shirts, pants, shoes, I am fairly certain you may even be able to buy underwear which really grosses me out but it is what it is. Let me set the scene of a typical shopping extravaganza for an African:

Picture a crowded alley way surrounded my little shanty's and the ground is naturally unpaved and therefore super dusty. You walk down said alley until you reach a huge opening with table after table of just heaps of clothes. Each table has one item whether it be shirts (tshirts on one table nice dress shirts on another) pants, sweaters, coats, etc. To find what you want you must dig through the piles upon piles of clothes to find the perfect item. Oh and why you are attempting to do these there are about 500 other people trying to get to the same pile of clothes and things are getting thrown everywhere, yet there seems to have some kind of system. A key point to this whole fun shopping trip is that the tables are in no way set to distinguish male and female clothes they are all thrown together, this is why i have found you will see grown men walking down the street in tshirts that are clearly made for women. Once you have settled on the winning item, you pay (bargaining naturally because they want to charge to much) and then you pay for your sack and take your coveted purchase home and wear it for the next three days straight to show it off.

Also in Africa Croc's have found new life. I have decided that the U.S and the rest of the world when the majority of the population realized how worthless crocs were gathered them all up and decided sending them to Africa would be a great idea. Everyone here wears some version of the God awful shoe. They LOVE these things they are their comfy after school shoe, or the walking to town shoe. I just do not understand it.

1990s style windbreaker neon tracksuits also a BIG draw here. They have whole stalls in the markets devoted to these great outfits, because every African male needs to be looking fresh in those fun pants and matching jacket. Before i leave here i will buy one of these just because i remember how much i loved mine back in 1994.

Now for the fun things i have learned this week
1. Big dadas(Swahili word meaning sister) always go for the small kakas( Swahili word for brother)- i learned this fun lesson from one of the other volunteers second headmaster last weekend when we were watching TV he informed us that being a small kaka he was scared of the big dadas.

2. My long hair apparently means i am rich- so this week there has been a lot of fuss about my hair at school and around. Last weekend at one point there were kids who kept touching it because they had never seen a white person with so much hair before and therefore wanted to touch it. Then at school my second headmaster and i were talking and he told me that it must be really expensive to have hair as long as mine. When i asked him why he said because I must have to put so much oil into it and that stuff isn't cheap. He could not believe me when i told him all i must do is shampoo and condition this hot mess.

3. Crayola markers are like gold to my students. I brought my bag full of markers to school to use in class and kids started flocking around me repeating the phrases "madam borrow me a marker" and "madam give me marker pen" all of this was said with the saddest looking faces possible for me to have pity on them which inevitably i did and let them borrow a marker to write on their books, then i became the most popular person at school, and i am pretty sure the other teachers were pissed, sucks for them.

I promise this weekend i will put pictures up because I am going to Mbeya, one of the pictures will def be of the chicken i sat next to on the bus for 4 hours last sunday, great expereince let me tell yah.