EdUKaid

Mambo! About three weeks ago I, Magalie, arrived in beautiful Mikindani. Although I’ve lived and worked in Tanzania before – i.e. 6 months in Dar es Salaam – these past few weeks felt like a new world was opening up for me. Being used to the noise and activity of Dar es Salaam and Belgium, it was as if I had just entered an unknown haven of peace. As all of my predecessors did, I began my stay in Mikindani with a two week period of EdUKaid’s notorious homestay. Although the principal aim of homestay is to equip EdUKaiders with a cultural and environmental understanding of life in Mikindani - and I do believe I have achieved that goal to a certain extend – I would like to take this opportunity to emphasize another reason as to why I find a homestay experience to be so valuable.

In contrast to what I had thought beforehand, the biggest challenges of my homestay were not the difficult living conditions or the introduction to ’strange’ habits. Instead, it was the confrontation with an alien silence that ended up being my most demanding yet most rewarding experience. During my homestay, I was reading a book by Isabelle Allende in which she states: “Life is nothing but noise between two unfathomable silences”. This sentence spotted my eye because it perfectly captured why my homestay felt so alienating. In the West, we have very busy lives – or we make them very busy. There is noise and activity everywhere, and since childhood we are trained and taught to do things. Our heads or full of noise and few people know how to be still and find a quiet place inside themselves. As a result, silence and solitude become our biggest fears.

In Mikindani people live incredible secluded lifes. Besides breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a visit to the market, there’s really not much to do. The largest part of the day is spend lying on a mkeka (mat) and waiting for the sun to disappear behind the horizon. As Westerners, we’re used to having the freedom to choose when and where to go or what to do. In fact, we consider this freedom as our safety net because it protects our minds from coming to a standstill.  During my homestay, however, this safety net was no longer there. And as I’m – as we all are - trained to do,  I had the ‘natural’ reaction of filling my head with noise, looking for food to feed my thoughts and escape the silence around me. However, in situations of solitude and quietness it is always easier – at least for me – to get lost in negativism rather than positivism.  Especially when one is surrounded by images of poverty, it is by no means easy to think happy thoughts. But human beings are strong creatures, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned it is that where there’s a will, there’s always a way.

In order to overcome the divide between life in Mikindani and life at home, and to obtain a better understanding of how people here think and act as an individual and as a society, it was imperative for me to first overcome my inner battle between the silence and the noise. It took me a while before I figured it out, after all I had to change the process of acting and thinking that I have learned and internalized over the past 23 years of my young life. I found that, if I open up to it, there was no need to fear that place of silence and stillness. Instead I ended up discovering a space where creative forces emerge, and opportunities, hope, strength, and wisdom arise. From that point onwards a new world opened up for me, and I could start enjoying my homestay.

Unfortunately the ‘fun’ was short lived. After a day of witnessing two people dying and being confronted with the harsh reality of AIDS, I ended up leaving my homestay a day earlier than planned. That, however, is another story.