Water is gathered by host sister each morning from a pump down the road. It is heated in a bucket for the "shower" poured from a cup. Food is cooked on charcoal. When the fire goes out, a live coal is brought from the neighbor's house to rekindle the flame. But there is cellphone coverage and with Skype all of us, David, Eamon, and I, from our separate computers, can reach into a house on a mountain above Morogoro, Tanzania. We can hear her voice and grill her with questions for 31 cents a minute. It costs nothing extra for her to receive our calls and text messages. She promises to keep the phone fed with enough credit for an emergency phone call to us, should one be necessary.
"But don't worry. Peace Corps is super safety-conscious."
"It's so good to hear your voice, Mom." She doesn't cry, but I can hear the underlying emotion and I am ready to cry buckets. Quickly I pull David into the call. He won't cry. He can fill the time with conversation while I gather myself.
Her day begins at 6:00 am with the shower from a bucket of warm water that her host sister prepared before Geneva got up. In a separate room? In a bathtub? Standing on bare dirt? What I do know is that the water is warm and and the experience is one of the highlights of Geneva's day.
Geneva helps prepare breakfast, eats with "Mama", host Dad, sister, and "little brother". Then she sets out on the 20-minute walk down the mountain to Morogoro, and language lessons with Kando and the four other Peace Corps volunteers in her training group. "When we finish our kiswahili lessons, we tease each other that we've peed in our pants. But even the Tanzanian's talk about this weather being hot. I can handle it."
The afternoon is more language lessons and then the walk back up the mountain, a second shower, cooking and dinner with her family. More language study. She tries to stay up until 10, when host Dad goes to bed, but usually falls asleep sooner, and sleeps like a log.
That is it; pretty much all of the information available for the $6.67 of Skype credit in my account when the call began. When the credit expired, Geneva's phone was dropped and Eamon, David and I were left to exchange a few more words. But I've recharged my account with $25 and look forward to a deeper peek into her life on a hillside above an African village I would never otherwise have known anything about.
