Karibuni (welcome everyone) to my Tanzanian blog. I’ll do my best to update as often as possible but based on the fact that the internet has already proven iffy we’ll see how that goes. The trip from DC to Dar es Salaam wasn’t so bad. Melissa and I had four seats to ourselves so we were able to sleep although people kept whacking me as they walked in the aisle. We had a 7 or 8 layover in Heathrow which wasn’t fun. Melissa managed to sleep a whole lot but I kept waking up when, once again, people kept running into me. I ate a Mars bar. That made me feel better. Our flight from Heathrow to Dar was long but uneventful. There were mostly white people on the plane which was really weird to me since on my flight to Ghana us whiteys were way in the minority. The second we got off the plane we were hit by the smell of Africa (What does it smell like you ask? The most identifiable smell is burning fires/trash/etc) and a massive wall of heat and humidity—bye-bye straight hair, hello frizzy mess. It seemed to take forever to get through customs but once we did and got our bags we discovered a man with our name on a sign (fancy, fancy). The Isabelle de Zamaroczy (the mom of the family we stayed with) had to send a driver for us since her car had broken down. Our first day passed in a daze (we got in at 7 am); we ate some food, bought phones, picked Zita up from school, went to the beach for a while, napped, ate dinner, and went to bed. Thrilling, I know. Day 2 we lounged around since the car was still in the shop and that night we went to the circus. It was kind of like Cirque du Soleil but scaled down to African size. There was dancing, juggling, some hilarious rapping mixed with hat juggling, lots of acrobatics, many contortionists (a guy managed to fit through at tennis racket...gross), etc. Friday we went with Isabelle to the fish market, went into downtown Dar for a meeting with some of the Walter Reed people, and then headed to the yacht club (ex-pat central) to watch the sunset. For dinner we ate crabs that made Chesapeake crabs look like the puniest creatures alive.
Saturday a driver appeared at 7 a.m. to take us to Mbeya. We did some driving around Dar to get gas and pick up James, the accountant (I think) who Melissa and I met in MD a few months back) and then were on our way. The drive was realllly long (we got here at 6:30ish) but it wasn’t too bad (the road was paved the whole way!). First we were in some hills then we dipped down to the savannah where the highway (by that I mean the main road that mostly has one lane each direction, sometimes a little less) goes through Mikumi National Park. We saw baboons, some deer like things, some other large unidentified African animal and 3 herds of elephants. For those of you who don’t know, elephants are my favorite animal so you can imagine how excited I got. It also made me angry that the US doesn’t have any fun animals like that wandering along main roads. We had a pit stop right after Mikumi then continued into the mountains, my least favorite part of the drive. The scenery was amazing but the huge trucks going super slowly and broken down on the narrow road every few kilometers made things a little nerve racking. We ended up on top of some mountains were there these huge valleys where towns are and then behind them are these hills of massive boulders and grass...it sort of reminded me of middle earth from the Lord of the Rings movies (please don’t mock my nerdiness). We stopped just outside of a big town, Iringa for the driver and James to get lunch and Melissa (we had peanut butter sandwiches with us) had her second or third experience with a pit toilet which was endlessly entertaining to me (especially since it was clean and could be flushed). For those of you who don’t know what a pit toilet is I’ll describe. There are two foot shaped ridged porcelain areas on either side of a hole type thing. That of course is a nice one, they only go downhill from there. The next part of the drive took us through pine tree farms (for paper mills) that looked like southern Virginia. I was especially amused by the wood fences that were around some houses and reminded me of Jamestown. We finally made it to Mbeya while it was still light. Not quite sure what to think of the town but James is going to take us around this afternoon to give us a better feel for things. The house we are in is nice—4 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms (ok 1 bathroom has a toilet and sink room, a shower and sink room, in addition to the sink in the middle of the hall...), a kitchen with lots of food, a dining room and living room area (with cable tv!!!) and there is a beautiful yard. Mbeya is really pretty...we are up in the mountains where everything is very green and it is warm out (maybe in the 70s). Apparently the rains should be coming soon which could be interesting since our house is off a dirt road.
I have to admit that last night when Melissa and I got here we were more than a little homesick (or even just homesick for Dar). We ate some dinner which the housekeeper, Jenny, had made for us and checked out the house before falling asleep. I have to say I feel a lot better about things today, and I am excited to go to work tomorrow and see what the offices are like. This morning I made Liss and I some scrambled eggs and toast which was fine. Ok well the toast was fine (and the tiny bananas) but my eggs were a little over done...the yolk in them was closer to white than yellow which confused me. We just finished unpacking all of our stuff (we are sharing a smaller room with twin beds), so things are feeling a little homier in here. Thankfully we have mosquito netting so I am currently in a nice bug-free haven (the netting is mostly protecting me from the flies which there aren’t even that many of).
Sorry for the boring-ness of these few paragraphs, hopefully I’ll have more exciting things to share once I discover more of Mbeya and see the office/finally find out why I am here.
Swahili for today:
-Karibu/Karibuni: welcome (singular/plural)
-Safari njema: safe journey
-Asante sana: thank you very much (you should all know that from Lion King)
-Nzuri: fine
-Hapana: no
