2) Our Now 2nd Family

JAMBO!

Four of the five weeks on Zanzibar, we would spend living with a host family. We didn't now anything about them beforehand, only that they live in Fuoni and their last name.

As I've already mentioned, our family seemed to be quite rich for african standards, especially driving by some slums on the way to our house. You can tell someone's rich by just looking at the outside of the house. 

Ours was a big bungalow with a huge wall with peaks around it. Most houses are detached without any fences or something similar around it, so when there's a big wall, you can be certain that the family who lives there has money.

House And Family

The house was subdivided into a living room, two kitchens (one inside and the main one outside), a small dining room, four bedrooms, two bathrooms and a storage room.

Our host family consisted of the parents, their seventeen years old son and thirteen years old daughter, a two years old girl (the moms niece) who was living with them as well, the moms 28 years old brother and a house girl.

The host parents both worked, which isn't all that common on Zanzibar. Usually the woman stays home, does the cooking, laundry, etc and watches the kids. Since they had a house girl, they both could work. Our mom worked in finance (something where she collects taxes from businesses) and the dad was a police man. 

The uncle (the moms brother, who was 28 years old) had a degree in finances as well but struggled to find a job so he worked as a taxi and Dala Dala (local buses) driver. Our siblings obviously still went to school. They both went to public schools and would take the school bus everyday. When we were living with them, they both had ramadan break for a month, though, so they didn't really talk about school.

Getting To Know Them

The all seemed like they were very lovely people but it was still a bit hard for us to get comfortable with them in the first few days. At our first dinner, we talked a bit with all of them and tried to get to know them a bit better but we were so tired from all the flying, that we went to bed relatively early that day. 

In the following days, communicating and causally talking with them got easier. One evening, for example, we decided to stay out with them a bit longer after dinner and do a skipping rope competition with our two older host siblings. On that evening we also talked about our family in Austria and our host brother even cut and prepared a sugar cane tree from their front yard for us.

Everyday, we got more comfortable talking with our family members and we also noticed how our host sister was encouraged more and more to speak English with us. Especially during cooking time, she tried to show us different techniques, for example, how to make coconut milk, but there's going to be a whole post about the food on the blog anyways.

One time, whilst cooing, we asked our sister, if she's excited to go back to school after them break and if she likes school in general and she quickly said no, she doesn't like school because there she gets homework and she also doesn't like when the teachers beat her or her friends. At first, Chiara and I weren't sure if we heard that correctly but she really said, her teachers beat her. It's crazy because we obviously both knew that in some country, that's "okay" and that's "normal" but if you hear it from an affected person, especially when she's your little teenage host sister, it's even worse that it already seemed.

Our host brother didn't talk with us as much as our sister did but it was always fun when he did. One time, for example, we somehow ended up talking about slaughtering animals and he told us in detail about how they do it and how sometimes chickens keep running after they cut their heads off. He also mentioned that the family once had a pet monkey which was named after some sort of of snake that kills and eats humans quite often.

Our two year old sister was a bit crazy sometimes. Sometimes, she would run around, pretend that she's eating everything and scream "GULAAA" (food) every now and then. Most times, she also ended up "eating us" as well and she thought it was the funniest thing in the world.

For a week or so, she was really hard to deal with, though. She would cry a lot, sometimes without any proper reason and sometimes just because she didn't get what she wanted right away or we told her not to hit or pinch other people. But most of the time, she was a sweetheart.

The uncle was quite fun to be around, too. After we once told him that sometimes people talk about us in the Dala Dala and we know that they do because they always say "mzungu" (which literally translated means "british" but swahili people use it as a word for "white person" in general), he would only refer to us as mzungus and greet us with a loud "MZUNGU" scream every time he would see us.

All in all, we always had fun with the people in our family, especially with our siblings and the uncle.

Extended Family

We got to know a quite big part of their extended family. Firstly, there were always cousins at our house. Always. Even when our siblings went to visit other family members, the house would never be empty, there would always be children running around.

One day, during the Ramadan celebrations, we went to visit the parents of our host mom (the teenagers grandparents) the little one's mom (the teenagers aunt) and her grandma from her father's side.

When we drove there, we noticed, that they must be and bit poorer than or family, since their village was small, it was a bit isolated from the main road and the road was extremely uneven and full of pot holes.

When we arrived at the grandparents (parents of our host mom and the little one's mom) house, our thoughts got confirmed. The house was small, didn't have any fencing and had a corrugated iron roof. Inside, there weren't any doors and the floor wasn't tiled or anything, it was just cold concrete. The other grandma's house looked similar.

Then we also visited the mom (our host moms sister) so that the little one could see her birth mom for a bit. Before, we didn't really get, why she was living with us but her mom probably just couldn't afford having her home, since she didn't have a husband and didn't work either.

Her house was in bad condition as well and we really wondered, how she manages to keep everything dry when it rains since her roof wasn't closed properly. All of those people were extremely welcoming, though, and even offered us food for lunch.

Another day, we drove some cousins (from the father's side) back to their homes and could see their houses as well. It shocked us, that their families were as poor as the families on the mothers side because we thought at least one of our host parents had to be from a richer background but both of their families were very poor. We still don't know, how our family could afford such a big house, so many cars and a house girl.

Marriage

One last thing that's maybe worth to mention is, that our dad only had one wife. Muslim men can have up to four wives, as long as they can afford it. Our sister told us, that he once had two wives but now he's only with this family.

Our parents also seemed like they were quite happy with each other. He was never rude to her, at least not in our presence, and they could always laugh a lot together, which we thought, was quite nice.

Happy?

Yes. We were extremely happy with and thankful for our host family and couldn't have wished for a better one. We had lots and lots of fun with them and they tried to include us in family activities whenever they could.