The first Swahili proverb I learned was “haraka, haraka haina baraka” or “rushing has no blessings.” Compared to my fast-paced, homework-filled life at Amherst, the relaxed life here caught me off-guard. After four-and-a-half months, I have gotten used to the slower pace, wearing longer skirts, doing laundry by hand, sleeping under a mosquito net, getting stared at, explaining to people that I’m not Chinese and feeling hot all the time. In fact, I am so well adjusted to the slow pace, that I am not ready for the quick changes student strikes have brought to campus.

My program began with a seven-week-long orientation and Swahili program at the end of June. We were supposed to have a week off and then classes would start at the beginning of September. Instead, the university opened at the beginning of October and classes didn’t really start until the middle of that month. In the time between Swahili class and university classes I spent time visiting a nearby orphanage, teaching English to wood carvers, wandering around Dar-es-Salaam, studying Swahili and traveling. I first traveled south to Lake Malawi on dusty buses speeding down bumby roads and took the waviest ferry ride of my life to an isolated village in the south. Then I went north to Arusha and saw Lake Mnara and Ngorongoro Crater on safari and visited a Masai village, and to Moshi, where I hiked near the base of Mt. Kilimanjaro. Finally, I visited Nairobi and thought I was in Europe because the buildings were so tall and so many people spoke English.

But, in between travels, I always returned to Dar and the haven of the university campus, with the monkeys playing outside my dorm, the cafeteria where everyone tries their best to say my name and my hot and dusty, but spacious, dorm room. I was ready for some changes, like the crowds of Tanzanian students moving on campus, my Tanzanian roommate with her Latino soap operas and loud cousin who visits once a day and to start going to classes taught in broken English. However, these poorly-taught classes have paused yet again. After weeks of threatening, the student government has finally approved strikes against the Tanzanian government for failing to grant student loans. About 100 or 200 of the 16,000 students have been marching around campus for the last two days, breaking up classes. A few times a day, they meet in the big, central hall and make speeches and sing patriotic songs. The Tanzanian Minister of Education was supposed to meet with student leaders today, but did not come and refuses to consider the students demands. No one knows what will happen tomorrow. If the students strike for three days, the government can legally shut the university down for three months. The sixty foreign students would still finish classes in some form, but all Tanzanian students would be banned from campus indefinitely.

If the school closes, I can travel more and spend more time with the orphans, but I will lose my roommate and my experience of studying at an East African university. I did not choose to study at the University of Dar-es-Salaam (UDSM) for its academic rigor, but to learn Swahili and study with Tanzanian students. If they close the school, I am back to hanging out with only Americans. I had started to think that the UDSM campus was a privileged, safe place, free from Tanzania’s problems and poverty, but after a week without regular running water and two days of student strikes, I have realized how wrong I was. If I do not learn anything else from my classes, I am learning how privileged I am to normally study in our Amherst bubble.