Safari!

This past weekend our training group went on a safari at Mikumi National Park, about 3 hours south of Morogoro. It was absolutely spectacular. We were lucky enough to see most of the major animals. We saw elephants, zebras, wildebeests, water buffalo, monkeys, antelope, and giraffes. I tried to take a good number of pictures, but I found I enjoyed myself most when I had the camera turned off. Kinda seems silly to look at animals through an LCD screen when they’re right in front of you, and it’s not like I’m exactly going to compete with National Geographic. That said, I did manage to get a number of decent shots. Most of these pictures speak for themselves, so I’ll keep the rambling to a minimum.



Zebras were everywhere. Bold as can be too, they’d often walk right up to the bus.





One of the watering holes we stopped at was filled with hippos. Hippos are not small. They are also inherently hilarious. I couldn’t stop chuckling for most of the time I was watching them. They just kind of float around all day, and occasionally make a prehistoric sounding snort. They look really docile, and maybe even a little cute. It became abundantly clear to us just how dangerous the critters are though when the lone 15-foot crocodile in the pond bolted away in fear from one of the grunting hippos. Unfortunately, the hippos and crocodile didn’t come above the water for very long, so it was hard to get a decent picture of them. All my attempts came out looking like floating logs. So, instead you get this sweet picture of me fearlessly standing in front of the death pond! You’ll just have to take my word though that it’s filled with hippos and a croc.



This next one is my favorite photo.



This is an Acacia tree. The branches are covered in super sharp 4 inch spikes. Africa: even the trees are made to kick your ass.



Being the knuckleheads that we are, we of course resorted to sneak attack spiking one another with fallen Acacia quills. Hey, we can’t be mature ALL the time. Poor Allen here just incurred Conor’s wrath. Conor’s face of pure sinister joy is priceless.



A few random photos now:


Peace Corps Trainee Neil looking especially prepared to take on whatever the safari throws his way.


Chacos and Peace Corps service go hand in hand.


This is Kit, a very good friend of mine from training. It really is hard to take a bad photo in Africa.

We closed out the day by all relaxing in the shade of an enormous baobab tree. Standing beside an ancient African tree while watching dusk settle over the grasslands, it’s hard not to be touched. I was flooded with a great sense of peace. This last month has been incredibly challenging. It was really nice having all the built up stress and fatigue just kind of wash away into the sunset.

Behold, the power of science!

Apologies in advance for how disjointed this post is. My time at the computer today is very limited, so I'm going to mostly focus on getting my photos to upload, (which is a serious task).

The big excitement last weekend was my (I like to think) courageous attempt at baking a cake. We don't have an oven, but by putting a smaller pot inside a larger one, and by putting coals on top of and beneath the large pot, I was able to make a convection oven. The name sounds a lot more complicated than the contraption actually ended up being. The family was definitely amused while I was putting the thing together though. I managed to buy some Pillsbury cake mix at the local import store, (cost me a pretty penny), so mixing the cake was really easy. I was not entirely confident that the baking process was going to work at all though, so man oh man was I relieved when the yard started to fill with the smell of chocolate cake. It took forever to cook. The shack was hot as hot can be. The cake itself ended up being a little burned around the edges. But damn, it was so good. I wanted to cry it was so good.





So, definitely something to check off on the list of things I never expected to do in my lifetime: baking a chocolate cake in a pot on a charcoal stove in the middle of East Africa.

While I was waiting for the cake to bake I took some pictures of the yard and family. Here's a shot of my host mama washing dishes:



Last Saturday we had our weekly group training session, and afterwards we got a chance to go to a local pub and hang out for awhile. We get very few chances to unwind, so the chance to just sit around over a couple beers was pretty great.



We managed to get a group shot of most of us last Saturday. We've only lost one trainee so far, (and he left within 12 hours of arriving in Dar es Salaam), so we're at an even 40 now. Not bad at all.



Our Saturday training sessions have a habit of dragging a bit near the end. Here's a shot of me and Cynth messing around in the back of the room. I think we were trying to be thugs or something. Honestly, who knows? Let's see YOU try to be attentive after 9 hours of lectures on cross cultural exchange.



This coming weekend's looking like it's going to be awesome though. To celebrate the half-way point in training Peace Corps is giving us the weekend off. Tomorrow we're all going on a safari in Mikumi National Park, which is I'm told about 3 hours away. I am ridiculously excited. I've been in Africa for over a month and have yet to see any elephants, zebras, or lions. Tomorrow, that's going to change. Hopefully I'll have some good photos to upload next week. Wikiendi njema kila mtu! (Have a great weekend everyone!)

One down, twenty six to go

Yesterday marked the one-month anniversary of my being in the Peace Corps’ loving clutches. It’s been one hell of a month. I’m now about halfway through training, and I’d be lying if I said it hasn’t been a little hard. We put in some seriously long days. About 5 hours of Kiswahili class five days a week, followed by teaching training in the afternoon. Just recently we’ve started teaching at internship schools as well. We then have safety and health training (with a few vaccinations thrown in for good measure… by the end of training we’re vaccinated against 15 different nasty diseases) all day on Saturdays. I’m really looking forward to being on site and having more than just a few hours a week to stop and breathe.

Due to popular demand, here are some pictures of my home stay. Here’s my bedroom. Note the handy mosquito net (no malaria for me thanks!) and the lantern (Tanzanian electricity is unreliable at best).



Here’s a photo of Baraka (which in Swahili means “in faith”), one of the little boys who lives in the house. He’s about 2 years old and is an absolute blast to have around. Aside from just being entertaining, he’s also a walking dictionary. He speaks no English, naturally, but all I have to do is point at something and he’ll bust out the (I hope) appropriate Kiswahili word. He follows me around the house all the time. Occasionally I’ll try to wow him with one of the amateur magic tricks I learned from a friend at college, and he seems to let it go whenever I mess up (which is most of the time). He’s a great kid all around.



Here’s a photo from just down the road from where I’m staying. They are the best of friends:




All in all I’m having a great home stay experience. My family is very patient with my Swahili, and they are teaching me a whole lot about how to cook here, (which’ll be damn important in about 4 ½ weeks). This past Sunday I cooked grilled cheese and egg sandwiches for the whole family. They absolutely loved it. I’m not a good cook by any stretch of the imagination, but with enough butter any grilled sandwich is mind-blowingly tasty. Here’s a shot of the shack where we cook and store food and chickens. Those are orange trees next to the building. Oddly enough, the oranges here are green. They taste exactly like American oranges… they’re just green. They’re still called oranges though. Even in Swahili, the word for the orange fruit and the color orange are the same. Go figure…



Speaking of chickens…. in the afternoon this past Sunday I was given the task of butchering one of our roosters. This was the first time I’d ever killed something I was about to eat, so I was a little nervous. My home stay brother (named Jonas) and I carried the bird out around the side of the shack and held it down. This was no small rooster. Easily bigger than Baraka, it was damn hefty. We stood on its wings and feet, and then I was given the knife. At this point most of the family gathered around, clearly amused by the clueless mzungu (means white person) and hapless kuku (means chicken). I was shown where to cut, and after bringing the knife down it was abundantly obvious that the knife was really really dull. We’re talking butter knife dull. The next 30 seconds were not particularly pleasant. I had to use most of my strength to saw the bird’s head off. The poor kuku really did not have a good day. Also interesting was how long it took to die. It must have taken a good 1 or 2 minutes after the head came off. Not pretty. After this we took it to the shack where we plucked its feathers, cut it up, and tossed it in a pot. While I managed to come out of the experience surprisingly unscathed, I’ve definitely gained a new appreciation for what goes into preparing meat.



While I’m on the death theme, I’ll throw in this picture just because I like it. There are many old graveyards in Morogoro, and this one is particularly striking:



All in all though, life right now is good. I’ve finally gotten into a nice rhythm with training, my Swahili is coming along well, and every day I get to walk for more than an hour amidst truly breathtaking views of the mountains and the countryside. Aside from the occasional stomach affliction and painfully hot afternoons, I really can’t complain at all. Hope everyone at home is doing well. Kwa heri na siku njema. (Take care and have a great day.)

Everybody's got something to hide

except for me and my monkey



Peace Corps Tanzania trainees are broken into groups of 4 for the majority of training. Each group is assigned an internship school where we take intensive language classes and practice teaching to actual students. The school I'm training at has a monkey that lives on the grounds. I had to work pretty hard to get a PG shot of the thing, as the damn critter has a delightful habit of performing unfortunate sexual acts on itself whenever someone stops to stare at it.



The school I'm interning at is really nice though. The kids are incredibly well behaved, and they are more than a little excited about us being there. Whenever I walk into a classroom you'd think I was the Beatles (yes, all 4). The place kids just get that excited. It is good having a chance to interact with the kids this early in the game though, and attempts at practice teaching have gone really well so far. I'm really looking forward to teaching on site in a few months. Every morning the really young ones are released to run once around the field by the school. It's called the daily "mchaka mchaka." The site of about 100 little African children in their red uniforms screaming and laughing while they blast around a school field is pretty much the most adorable thing I've ever seen. I'll try to get a picture of it soon.




In other news, the weather here has been scorching. It's the beginning of the summer, and while I'm lucky enough to be in a relatively dry part of the country, it is still painfully hot once afternoon rolls around. Summer in ecuatorial Africa... gotta love it. The walk home every day after school is pretty brutal, (it's about a 30-45 minute hike in the heat, depending on how many people I stop to talk with on the way... which is usually a lot, as Tanzanians are big on the greeting thing). It is a beautiful route though. Red dirt roads through villages and palm tree groves.



I'm pretty entranced by Mount Uluguru too, I'm really hoping to get a chance to climb it at some point. Apparently there's a cloud-based rainforest near the top. Far out.

Digits

I'll dig a tunnel
from my window to yours,
yeah a tunnel from my window to yours.
You climb out the chimney
and meet me in the middle,
the middle of the town.
And since there's no one else around,
we let our hair grow long
and forget all we used to know

UPDATE: Ok, so it turns out the best way to reach me is to dial +011 255 773 430 916 (if you're dialing from outside the US). If that fails, the one listed below should work... probably. African cell phone networks, gotta love em.

Who knew, but Morogoro has a cell phone signal. I got out a bit early from training today and went and bought a super cheapo phone. I'm not sure if I'll have reception when I'm actually on site, but for now I'm back in the network. My number is:

0773 430 916

The country code is 255 (I think).

I can't make calls out of country, but I can receive them. There are some pretty cheap calling cards out there, so if you absolutely can't live without hearing my voice give me a call. Just remember that I'm 7 hours ahead of East Coast time.

I wake up usually at 5:30am, and go to bed at 9:30. I walk to the school I'm training at between 7:15am and 8:00. (It's about 3 miles) That'd be a great time to give me a ring. On the flip side, I get out of training at about 5:00 pm.

In other news, I did my laundry by hand for the first time on Sunday. Washing machines are my new favorite invention. The soap they use here burns your hands, and you have to scrub unbelievably hard to do a decent cleaning job. It took me about 2 hours to wash 3 tshirts, 2 button down shirts, and 2 pairs of pants. Bad. Times. My hands and wrists are still raw. My hands are going to be super gnarly by the time I come back stateside. Either that or I'm going to splurge and hire someone to do my laundry for me. Probably the latter. 2 hours of chemical burn every Sunday is not a particularly endearing proposal.

I also saw the fattest rooster ever while walking to training this morning. Holy god this thing was huge. I'll try to get a picture of it at some point. This thing will blow your mind. I know it made my day. (Yes, this is the type of excitement I've been reduced to. If you think this is bad, just wait 2 years.)

And now, I'm off. I hope to hear from some of you.

Kwa heri!

Lately it occurs to me

What a long, strange trip it's been.

It's only been 10 days since I arrived in Tanzania, and I couldn't even begin to describe everything that's happened since I've been here. I'm finally starting to feel settled here at my host house, and I think I'm starting to get the basics of Kiswahili down. The people in Morogoro have been wonderful, and it's an absolutely beautiful town. It's at the base of a spectacular mountain called Mlima Uluguru. A tribe of monkeys is known to live in the woods near my home. I've seen a couple of them so far. I'm definitely not in Maine anymore...



This week's been one hell of a ride. We finished up staging in Dar es Salaam last weekend. In Dar we got to meet all of our support staff in Tanzania, as well as a couple active volunteers. Strangely enough, I've met two other Mainers already: one is a current volunteer from Waterville, the other is a member of the Peace Corps Tanzania staff hailing from the County. We spent 2 days in Dar getting stuck full of needles and crash coursed on Peace Corps Tanzania basics. Here's some of us at the Peace Corps Tanzania headquarters:



Conor and Mike were my roommates during staging, and Dick (the older fellow) is in my language training group here in Morogoro. This is Dick's 3rd round with Peace Corps (Iran in the 60s, and Samoa a couple years ago). Talk about hardcore. He's one of the other ICT volunteers, so we'll be doing most of our training together. I'm sure I'll be able to learn a whole lot from the guy.

After finishing up in Dar we took a bus to Morogoro. This was my first real chance to see the Tanzania I'd been expecting. Driving out of Dar and seeing the city fade to countryside was amazing. You're going to hear me saying this a lot, so get used to it: Tanzania is beautiful.




We arrived at the training facility in Morogoro in the afternoon, and immediately after arriving we were met with a traditional African dance. Despite how deliriously tired we all were, (between the let lag, frayed nerves, and utter lack of sleep we were all pretty messed up at this point), most of us got pretty into the dance.

We spent 2 days training in the Morogoro facility learning basic Swahili and the main health issues to worry about (boil, cook, or peel everything, pit toilets suck but you'll get used to them, and don't go swimming... ever). After that, it was off to our host families. I don't think I've ever been more anxious in my entire life than I was on the dala dala (bus) ride over... (think first-date-ever anxious). I'm sure I made a ridiculous impression on my host family when I first arrived. I was sweating bullets, stuttering, and what little Swahili I thought I knew decided to completely and utterly vanish from my head. It was prettymuch a train wreck all around. (After talking to the other trainees though, we all had more or less similar experiences. It's a rite of passage I guess.)

I hope to have more pictures of where I'm living posted soon, but I don't want to look like a tourist in the first week here. These are going to be an interesting but really challenging 10 weeks of training. The other trainees are a great bunch, and I'm going to really enjoy going through this with them. I think it'll be really hard to say goodbye to them when we ship off to our actual sites.




That said, all in all I'm doing well. I couldn't be happier about being here. Hamna shida! (That's the Tanzanian equivalent of hakuna matata).