Introduction of Natalie Struble

Dear Students of Mrs. Allen,

Hi! I’m Natalie Struble.

Mrs. Allen is a wonderful friend of mine from Otterbein College. We ran cross country and track together, and lived in the same dorm. We had LOTS of fun together.  During my sophomore year, I transferred from Otterbein to Ohio State University, where I studied Agricultural Engineering. After completing my B.S. in Ag Engineering I applied to and joined the Peace Corps. I had spent the past 6 years in Columbus, Ohio before Peace Corps. I was assigned as an environment volunteer to Tanzania, the country with the best Swahili in East Africa! People here say the language of Swahili “was born in Tanzania, got sick in Kenya, and died in Uganda.” That’s one country’s opinion...  meaning Tanzanians speak more pure and correct Swahili than other countries. Joining the Peace Corps is a 2 year commitment. I arrived in TZ with 40 other health and environment volunteers from around the country. We lived with families in villages during our 2 months of technical and language training, where we learned ‘survivial’ Swahili, and how to garden and teach about proper health. After finishing training and swearing in as Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs), we were assigned to and moved to rural villages throughout TZ. We live and work alongside our host country counterparts, friends, and neighbors, eating ugali (stiff maize porridge, like play-doh made of maize flour) and speaking Swahili.

Right now I live in a village of around 3000 people located north-west of the town of Njombe. If you want to find it on a map, it is south of Iringa and Makambako, in the Southern Highlands area of Tanzania.

I live in a brick house with a tin roof and a concrete floor. I have a courtyard, which is just a fenced in dirt-floored area where one does laundry and things like that. It’s kind of like a backyard, except used more. To enter my house, I go in through my courtyard gate, then go in the door of my house. I live on the school grounds of our primary school, which has kindergarten through 7th grade. I do not have electricity, except for a solar-powered LED light, which can also be used to charge my cell phone. I do not have water in my house, but there is one tap that is located on school grounds. Thankfully, part of school responsibilities is for students to do work, and this includes carrying water in 20L buckets to my house. It is stored in a waist-high plastic barrel in my house. This lasts me about a week. My main water usage is for laundry and bathing. My toilet is called a ‘choo’ (rhymes with ‘low’), and it is a pit latrine with a wooden hole that one just squats over. The walls are brick, there’s no door, and the roof is thatch/grass. The windows in my house are glass. There are 3 rooms in my house – living room, bedroom, and kitchen. I have a little shower building at the back of my courtyard with a concrete floor and tin roof. There’s a little storage room outside my house where I keep my huge bags of charcoal, my charcoal stove, sticks (for starting fires), various burnable trash, a little pile of rotted potatoes, and lots and lots of daddy long legs!

I work mostly with the teachers of my primary school, teaching environment to 5th, 6th, and 7th graders, and this year I’m adding 6th grade math. I am working with the teachers of our primary school to write a grant to get solar powered lights at the primary school and for the 11 teachers’ houses that are on the school grounds. This will allow students to have ‘study sleep-overs’ where they can stay overnight at school to study in the evening. It will also allow the teachers to have light at night so they can grade notebooks and plan lessons for the next day. Without solar light, people have to use candles (which are too expensive for everyday use) or kerosene lanterns (which give off smoke that you end up breathing in if you’re close enough to it for your papers to be lit up well enough).

That’s about it for now! My internet time is limited to whenever I come into Njombe town, which is a 1 ½ hour bus ride from my village that goes just once a day. Today my bus is leaving at 2pm; it’s now 12:42! After this I still need to go buy some bananas, beans, carrots, green peppers and onions in the soko (market), and pick up some pictures that I got printed for the teachers at my primary school.

Siku njema! (Have a good day!)

Natalie