Life in 360p
Written on March 7th, 2026 by Ben Weber
Since the beginning of my service, I’ve become quite conscious of my use of data. The unlimited data plan I had grown up on in the United States is not available here in Tanzania. In Tanzania, all the variety of sim providers only offer data by the megabyte in the form of bundles. The lifestyle I had for using data under and unlimited data plan is quite expensive here. As a tangent, a weird part of social media or tech culture here is that most Tanzanians have at least two or three different sim cards which means most Tanzanians have three different phone numbers. It can be quite cumbersome to note down all the different ways to contact someone in Tanzania.
My hard drive broke back in August of 2025. I spent a lot of time in August of 2024 downloading shows and movies to use during my service. Specifically, comfort movies like the Star Wars series and shows I hadn’t watched before like Seinfeld and The Sopranos. I had been absentminded and left the data cable in during my travels for a whole year which eventually bent and destroyed the connections on the hard drive itself. Since then, I’ve had to be very selective in what I download to watch later since the storage across my devices has become quite limited since the loss of my terabyte hard drive.
Anyways, I’ve become accustomed to streaming YouTube in 360p to save data so I can maximize the number of videos I can watch. Occasionally, I download videos at 144p or 240p at the few internet cafes present in my region. When I want to download a tv show or movie, I have become accustomed to torrenting shows at the lowest quality. Since I lost my download of Seinfeld midway through the fourth season, I re-torrented it at 360p to finish the series. In a way, I feel spiritually or temporally connected to the viewers of the show during the original release during the 1990s.
Since starting my second year of service and after my short leave from Tanzania to South Africa in December, all the things that I had become accustomed to in Tanzania started to feel a tad foreign again. I’ve been longing for the luxuries I once willing left behind. I miss having prepared food whenever I want. Whether that be through shopping at grocery stores before closing, going to restaurants serving diverse cuisine, and especially fast-food joints open 24/7. Tanzanian cuisine for weeks on end is boring and repetitive. I miss refrigeration, I miss microwaves, I miss having access to foods that aren’t grown in my region. While I miss the food availability options the most, I also long to attend events like concerts, sporting events, game nights, or other various social activities with friends. As volunteers we gather once every two to three weeks which doesn’t feel like often enough at times. Many Friday and Saturday nights I spend alone in my house waiting to get tired enough to sleep so I can skip to morning. I’ve found myself dreaming of the days I can appreciate and experience the luxuries I once took for granted again.
In other news, the beginning of this school year has been a success so far. I’ve felt more confident in the classroom and have a better understanding of how to teach my students. Many of my fellow education volunteers feel the same. Last year we were thrown into the deep end without much context on the differences between the Tanzanian education system and its differences with the American education systems. I’ve found that Tanzanians won’t point things out to you if you don’t ask. For example, a big revelation I had at the end of last year was that the school had textbooks to provide for the students. No one ever told me that was option for me. Either they assumed I had decided not to use the textbooks (even though the previous forms had used the textbooks) or they didn’t think to inform me. There’s part of me that is frustrated that I wasn’t informed by either the teachers at my school or the teachers who work Peace Corps. But I also acknowledge that this is just part of the cultural differences between the United States and Tanzania. I’ve since given a textbook on the form three topics to most of students, and I plan to give the accompanying form two and one textbooks to my students as well. I hope that having access to the material on hand will improve the students’ scores and encourage them to study outside of class more often.
Since me and my fellow volunteers have arrived in country the Tanzanian education system has rehauled its curriculum for the form one and form two students. This is a lucky happenstance for most of us volunteers because we either get to teach the newer, refined curriculum to the form one and form two students. Or in my case I can give form one and two textbooks to my students without interfering with the other forms.
I’ve been in Tanzania for 551 days or just over 18 months and I’ve begun thinking about what the next step in my journey looks like. I only have a mere 9 months remaining which I know will be gone before I know it. I signed up for a GRE self-paced curriculum in preparation for graduate school to help my application chances when I eventually decide to choose to pursue that option, but I don’t think that will be my next step. I’m not too keen on returning to the United States at this moment nor in the very near future. I would like to return home to see my mom and my pets and my friends but I’m not actively looking to build a lifestyle stateside anytime soon.
I have been thinking of extending my service through Peace Corps like many volunteers have done. There are a few options for volunteers when extending, I can extend in Tanzania at another location in country or even in another Peace Corps operated country. A few volunteers from the cohort who arrived a year before me extended for another year in Tanzania. In one case, one volunteer extended for a year in another country. I’ll find out more about this option at our Mid-Service training at the end of March. I’ve also been looking into JET program which is the Japanese Exchange and Teaching Program. A college friend of mine did JET for a year after her graduation and seemed to enjoy it greatly. For me, it seems like a good transition between Peace Corps and restarting my life back in the United States.
Time will tell what my next step will be, but I’ll be sure to keep y’all updated what happens next!
The photo for this post is an image from my perspective on heading back to my village. There had been a rainstorm the night before, which made it harder for the cars and trucks to climb the hills into my village. Often, the driver will stop and most of the passengers will exit the vehicle to decrease the weight in the vehicle so the car can climb the steepest part of the hill. Tanzania is actively developing their road infrastructure but outside of the main roadways in between regions and large factories the roads are the ones created after years of motorcycle, car, and truck traffic…
