Wednesday 6/26
Rebekah and I went to breakfast in the orphanage dining room. After breakfast, we went to the middle house. Not more than 10 minutes after we arrived, Rebekah got hit in the head with a metal can. It looked like it hurt a lot, but it was very funny. When it was time for milk, we helped feed the children. Neema didn’t want to drink her milk by herself so I just had to keep a hand on her cup the whole time. After we went to tea, a bunch of the kids had accidents on the floor. The middle house is where the kids get potty trained, so there are a lot of accidents because they don’t use pull ups. We helped feed the kids lunch, and then we returned to our rooms until lunch.
In the afternoon, we joined one of our American friends that we met at Uhuru Hotel in Moshi for swimming with some kids from the school she has been working with since she first came to Tanzania in 2009. Her name is Aimee, and there were two students from Cornell staying at her house until July 18th. The three of them, Rebekah and I, and the kids from the school went swimming at Protea Hotel, which is down the road from the orphanage. The rest of the gang picked up Rebekah and I in a modified jeep, and we had to cram into the back as if we were on a crowded dala dala. I guess we’re used to squished car rides at this point, so it was not a problem!
After we arrived at Protea, Rebekah and I felt the water and it was very cold. We decided to get in the water anyway. My logic was if I didn’t swim then, I might not use my bathing suit before going home and I wanted to be able to say that I had used everything I packed to come here. With that being said, we didn’t stay in the water very long. The kids stayed in a little while longer than we did, but they were all shivering a lot when they got out. It was cold for us, but at least we’re used to winters in the US; the Tanzanian children were probably the coldest they had ever been.
After everyone had dried off and changed, we moved to a table in the restaurant for dinner. We ordered a couple of each dish on the menu and shared around the table (the menu wasn’t very extensive). We had beef stroganoff, calamari, vegetable curry, and fish to share. We arrived back at the orphanage late, and I felt like we were waking up the whole village. We hoped we didn’t wake any of the children or sisters.
Thursday 6/27
Today was a pretty typical day playing with the kids at the orphanage. Rebekah wasn’t feeling well, so she stayed in bed until tea. I went to the middle house, and our friend Bob Kasworm (a Nebraskan who works at Machame Hospital nearby) visited right after tea. Rebekah joined me in the middle house after Bob left to help with lunch with the kids.
After our lunch, we took bubbles outside for the kids. Some are really good at blowing bubbles, but others don’t quite get the concept. Either way, all the children enjoyed chasing the bubbles once they were blown. When the kids went inside, Rebekah and I helped with baths for the oldest house. After that, Aimee arrived at the orphanage with the rest of the Cornell students who are staying in Machame (the nearby village). Lodoe and Matt are staying at Aimee’s house and working with her at the school, and Mike and Katrina are staying at Machame Hospital and working there. We went through the three houses with them, and by the time they left, it was too dark to see anyone inside. The power had been out all day and was out for a couple days in total.
Friday 6/28
After breakfast, we went to the baby house. We spent all morning there except for tea. After the babies were fed, they went to take a nap so we left. Outside our building, Rebekah found a cool looking bug by the shoe scraper. We brought him to our common room and named him George. Rebekah did laundry before lunch, and I lost George when I went to my room to get something. After lunch, Bob Kasworm picked us up at the orphanage to go into town. He introduced us to the Union Cafe, which is a very touristy place. They have a very extensive menu of American and European food, but Rebekah and I didn’t eat there. The other volunteers, Anna and Raechel, stayed there while Rebekah and I went to run some errands.
We went to the Nakumatt, which is a large supermarket in town. I found a book of French verbs, which I thought might be helpful if I study abroad in France next year, so I decided to buy it. It was only 7,000 shillings, which is less than $5. After I led us the wrong way out of the Nakumatt, we went to the Kicheko internet cafe. We spent an hour there, and Bob picked us up there before we headed out of town back to Machame. When we got back to the orphanage, I ate dinner in the orphanage dining room; it was rice and beans, one of my favorite meals here! After dinner, Rebekah and I had a tickle fight in our hallway before going to bed.
Saturday 6/29
At breakfast, I enjoyed the peanut butter I had bought at the Nakumatt yesterday. After breakfast, we went back to the room to return my peanut butter, and we found George! We brought him outside when we went back out, and he flew away! We weren’t even sure he could fly up to that point. Shortly afterward, two buses arrived carrying 23 students from the international school in Munich and their chaperones. They were all in eleventh grade except for two, who were in tenth grade. The international school in Munich started Project Tanzania about 20 years ago, and the orphanage Rebekah and I are staying at is one of the organizations they support through the project. They brought about 15 large suitcases worth of donations they had collected throughout the previous year. The donations filled tables and chairs in the reception room. The students left around noon, and then it was time for lunch for us.
After lunch, Rebekah and I decided to go for an adventure outside the orphanage. We walked out through the orphanage orchard past the Women’s Dairy Co-op where the orphanage gets its milk and to the road. We walked past where the market is on Thursdays and once we left the village, we started down the very steep hill toward the river. We found a path that wound its way down the hill through the trees, so we decided to take that route instead of the road. Sister Elly had told me on our first walk that the orphanage owns all the land from the orphanage down the hill to the river, so I figured it wouldn’t be a problem to take the foot path. After we half walked, half slid down the hill, we kept walking down the road to a bridge over the river. After taking a few pictures of the river, we started the journey back up the hill. When we reached a fork in the road, we took a break on the grassy bank on the side of the road. A man on a motorcycle stopped to talk to us for a little while. Two ladies stopped to talk to us also, but they didn’t speak English so we could only exchange greetings in Swahili. They seemed happy to see us though.
We kept walking up the hill after we had taken a short break. We were stopped about halfway up by a man who introduced himself as Frederick. He gave us a very long history lesson on Africa, including a bit about Nelson Mandela. A man with cows that we had seen earlier at the bottom of the hill stopped his cows across the road so that he could listen to our conversation. Frederick said he went to church locally and was a guide for visitors. He offered to show us nearby waterfalls, but fortunately he didn’t mean right then because he said he had somewhere important to be. We said thank you and goodbye to him and kept walking up the hill and through the village back to the orphanage.
When we got back, we met some more visitors. A woman named Barbara from Germany was there with her boyfriend. They told us they were there visiting Johnson, who just arrived at the orphanage three days before Rebekah and I returned to volunteer. Sister Anna handed me Ester from the middle house because she was crying. Rebekah and I had to run back to our rooms, so Ester came with us. When we got back outside, a group of Nebraskans arrived. I went to return Ester to the middle house because all the kids were inside, and I got sucked into helping with bath time. I went back outside just before Helga from the middle house left with her family. Her relatives were taking her home.
After the Nebraskans left, Rebekah and I helped with baths for the oldest house. We saw the German couple was outside again so we went to talk to them. We found out Johnson’s story from them. The guy was working at Machame Hospital when Barbara came to visit. She saw Johnson in the first bed in the maternity ward and found out that he had been abandoned at birth two months earlier. He was premature so he is still very small. Barbara visited him every day for two weeks and tried to find his family, without luck. She is not able to adopt him because she hasn’t lived in Tanzania for the required two years, but they want to support him as he gets older. Barbara was very upset to leave him, but it was their last day in Tanzania.
After they left, we started toward our rooms. We were stopped by Sofia Urio and Sisters Melissa, Elly, and Agnes, who were gathered in a room on the edge of the dining hall. Sister Elly walked us around the dining hall to show us what work is still to be done, and then she offered us soda and peanuts from the tray they had. Rebekah and I split a Passionfruit Fanta. I did laundry when we finally made it back to our rooms, and then we went to dinner.
Sunday 6/30
We went to church at 10 after breakfast. Sister Paulina translated the song numbers for us, but I forgot my iPod so I couldn’t follow along on the Bible readings from the app on my iPod. Mama Esther from the college led the service. After church we went back to our rooms to grab what we needed to go to town. We went to catch the dala dala and ran into Robinson, the gatekeeper, down the road. The dala dala wasn’t very full at the beginning, but it was very slow and made long stops along the way. We observed some interesting people on the dala dala. There was a man with a huge scar taking up most of the back of his head. An old woman squeezed in next to us after a while and was talking on her cell phone. She had the phone held in her fist, and she held the top end of the phone against the side of her head with the other end sticking straight out away from her mouth. She was practically yelling into the phone. After she got off, a young woman sat down next to us who introduced herself as Anna. She tried talking to us with the little English she knew, but the conversation ended quickly when we reached the limit of her English abilities.
We got off before we reached the town center so we could take a short cut to the Uhuru Hotel. We went to eat at the Green Bamboo Barbecue at the hotel. The waiter came to take Rebekah’s order but left before I could tell him mine, so I had to flag him down a little while later to order my food. After we ate, Pastor Stephen Massawe and his wife Haikael came over with their children to say hello. We thought we saw them sitting at a table in the grass, but we weren’t sure it was them until they came over. Rebekah and I both used the internet at the hotel and then it was time to head back. We went to the bureau de change to exchange money, but we didn’t think about the fact that it was Sunday so they weren’t open. We made it back to the orphanage, and I messed around with the pictures I had recently taken. At dinner, we watched some African soap operas.
Monday 7/1
We couldn’t believe it was July already! President Obama was in Tanzania July 1st and 2nd, but he was in Dar es Salaam, which is an all day bus ride away from where we are. After breakfast, we went to the baby house. Ema fell asleep in my arms after the babies had milk. We went back to our room before lunch. After lunch, our friend Aimee picked us up to go to hot springs. We went back to her house to pick up the four Cornell students, and on the way there, she gave us grilled corn to try. It tasted like popcorn. We went to pick up a teacher from the school Aimee works with, but she said she couldn’t come because we were going to get back too late. Instead, we brought three students from the school. When we left the school, Rebekah and I were sitting in the bed of the truck with the four Cornell students, and Aimee was in the cab with the three kids and the driver.
We drove toward the city of Arusha and then turned south (I think) onto a dirt road. We drove for about 45 minutes on the dirt road, and by the time we got to the hot springs, I was covered in a layer of dust that was thick enough that it looked like I had gotten a tan on the way there instead. We didn’t think we were ever going to get there, but finally we drove into a cluster of trees and we were there! From my experience with hot springs in Costa Rica, I thought the place was going to be developed as a tourist attraction, but I was wrong. There is only a tarp strung up between some branches to change behind and a rope tied to a tree to swing into the water. Other than that, there is a just a clear blue pool of water surrounded by rocks. The water wasn’t exactly hot, but it was definitely warmer than the pool we had swam in at Protea the week before. There was a log in the water that we could sit on, but when Mike from Cornell tried to dive off of it, he landed on another part of the branch with his face. His nose had a cut on the side and was bruised and swollen. I tried to swing a second time off the rope, but my hands were wet so I slipped off almost immediately after I jumped from the rock.
We left the hot springs as the sun was setting and headed to the Uhuru Hotel in Moshi to eat dinner. Along the way, Aimee bought sugar cane from a guy walking past and shared it with everyone. Sugar cane is just supposed to be chewed on to extract the juice and then the fibers are spit out. It was also good stargazing in the back of the truck once the sun went down. We ate at the Green Bamboo Barbecue at the Uhuru Hotel. It was very late when we got back to the orphanage, and we discovered that Robinson, the gate keeper, had already gone home for the night. I got out of the truck to try opening the gate, but it was locked. I called Sister Elly and woke up her up by accident, but she called the night watchman so he came and let us in. By that time, the gate keeper had also shown up. Rebekah and I guessed he lives across the street because we don’t know how else he could have known we were back or gotten there so quickly. We thanked Robinson and the night watchman and returned to our rooms. I took a shower even though it was almost midnight because I was so gross from the hot springs. After that, I went straight to bed!
Tuesday 7/2
After breakfast, we went to the baby house again. Rebekah handed her key to one of the children and Mosess, Elisha, and Baraka all tried unlocking doors with it. The doctors came again. I figured it was the first Tuesday of every month because they came the first Tuesday of June as well. It was the same two doctors as before plus two more that I hadn’t seen before. They were particularly interested in seeing Johnson because he had only been at the orphanage for a little over a week. One of the doctors asked about Elisha and seemed interested in adopting him. She asked about him, and we found out that his mom died during c-section. Ema fell asleep in my arms again after they left—it seems to be becoming a habit of his.
After lunch, we went back outside. We were going to go back to the babies, but we got distracted with the older kids and never made it back there. When they went inside, we went to help dress the kids after bath time. It was only Sister Jacqui and us doing bath time, so there was no one to pick out clothes for us to put on the kids. The kids helped us, but Sister Jacqui changed some of the kids afterward. Rebekah and I took the laundry to the laundry container and then went back to the third house. We played with them for a little while longer, but Sister Jacqui nicely kicked us out when the kids started eating dinner because we were distracting them.
At dinner, Sister Jacqui told Sister Anna in Kiswahili that we were a big help with the third house. We laughed and explained that Sister Jacqui had to change some kids after we had dressed them, and Sister Anna laughed too. After dinner, we went to prayer with the sisters. There is prayer every morning at 8 and every evening at 7. There was a huge black beetle on the floor when we walked in that Sister Narumishwa kicked out the door when she came in a few minutes late. I carried it all the way outside when prayer was over. Later that night, Rebekah and I inspected the bug bites on our legs from dinner at the Green Bamboo. We both had bites all over our legs, and I took pictures of mine to document the experience. It was a good thing we both had anti-itch cream with us!
Wednesday 7/3
After breakfast, we went to the middle house. Around midmorning, two wazungu (white people) came with a Tanzanian man and Pastor Urio. One of the visitors was named Natalie also! She asked about Mary, the special needs girl in the middle house. Sister Regina told us that Mary is 10 or 11, and she was abandoned at the hospital about 5 years ago. When the middle house went outside, the college students working with the middle house asked us to watch the kids while they went for tea. While they were gone, Ester from the middle house chipped her two front teeth on the side of the slide after an older boy came down and hit her.
When we went to tea after that, we had passionfruit juice and ginger cookies. I noticed when we left tea that our stuff was sitting in a nest of fire ants, and one of them bit the top of my foot while I was shaking my stuff out. At lunch, we ate with Sister Anna and Pastor Urio, who was still visiting from the morning. We talked about Obama and Bush, because Obama was in Tanzania until yesterday and Bush was apparently still in the country. Obama had just promised billions of dollars in aid to energy in Africa.
In the afternoon, we played with bubbles with the oldest house. The babies were on a mat outside and some of the kids from the middle house were visiting them. Rebekah helped take the middle house back inside to take baths, and I helped take the babies inside. I fed Ema, and I was as slow and messy as I was the first time I fed a baby, but he didn’t cry at all. We had rice and beans (our favorite!) for dinner, and afterward I took a shower and went to bed.
Thursday 7/4
Happy fourth of July! After breakfast, we went to the baby house. Elisha fell asleep face down on the floor right after milk and stayed there until a staff member woke him up for lunch. Shangwe fell asleep with her head resting on my leg. In the afternoon, we went outside with the second and third houses. A family came to visit a child from the baby house, but we couldn’t tell which one it was from where we were standing. We helped with bath time for the third house after they went inside.
When we came back outside, we saw that Mt. Kilimanjaro was almost completely visible through the trees. We decided to take a walk past the hospital up the hill to get a clear view and take some pictures. We told Sister Regina we were leaving to go for a walk and pointed to the mountain and she said, “Is it easy for you to reach there?” We said yes and she said, “I don’t think so.” We finally figured out that she thought we were climbing the mountain that afternoon and we clarified that we were only walking to the hospital to get pictures.
When we reached the main road, two guys introduced themselves to us as Rick and Joseph. Rick said they were local guides and offered to take us on a hike to see some local waterfalls (it’s not the only time we’ve gotten that offer). We said we were only going to take pictures of the mountain, and Rick said they were walking that way anyway so they would go with us. When we reached a good view of the mountain, Rick insisted he take a picture of us and Joseph on Rebekah’s camera and then asked Joseph to switch places with him. They gave us a worn brochure of Kilimanjaro National Park and wrote down their contact information for us. After Rebekah finished taking pictures (my camera was dead), we started walking back down. We stopped at the hospital shop on the way back down for each of us to get a Sprite. We went straight to dinner when we got back to the orphanage, and then we returned to our rooms. We both wanted to go to bed early, but we ended up hanging out in Rebekah’s room until midnight. Whoops!
I keep saying I'm going to catch up on my blog... I promise it will happen at some point! Even if it's after I get home...
It turns out my post for Bukoba actually did post on Wednesday when I thought it didn't! Anyway, here's the slideshow to accompany that post!
Enjoy!
Saturday 6/22
After breakfast at the Uhuru Hotel in Moshi, we loaded up the bus to go to Kilimanjaro Airport. Our flight to Bukoba was originally scheduled to leave at 12:20, but it had been changed to 10:30. When we arrived at the airport, we all lined up to get our passports checked. We went to the check-in desk and Pastor Chad got all our boarding passes. I didn’t get a boarding pass at first, but that issue was resolved quickly. After checking all our luggage, we went to wait to go through security. There’s free wifi at the airport, so all of us had our laptops, iPods, and iPads out. There was a British news channel playing on one of the TVs. We went through security to wait near our gate. When I say gate, I mean a double door in the wall of windows that looks out onto the runway and taxi area. There are no jetways at the Kilimanjaro Airport, so when you board a plane you just walk out the doors and up the stairs into the plane. We were assigned to Gate 6, but Gate 5 was about 15 feet away and if it was unlocked, it would have made no difference which gate we went out of.
After a delay, we boarded the plane. We didn’t actually take off until about 45 minutes after we were supposed to, which was accredited to the plane being late from Dar es Salaam. I was seated in the last row of the plane, which was still only row 18. After we took off and ascended through the clouds, we saw the peak of Kilimanjaro sticking out above the clouds. This was probably the best view of the mountain that the rest of the group got while they were in the country. After a short flight, we landed in Mwanza. Since we were delayed out of Kilimanjaro and half the passengers on the plane were our group, our next plane was waiting for us in Mwanza to continue to Bukoba. We walked across the tarmac and boarded the other plane. As soon as our group was seated, we took off again. This leg of the trip was almost entirely over Lake Victoria. We landed in Bukoba after a descent over the lake. The end of the runway at the Bukoba airport is on the edge of the lake, so when you land it sometimes seems like you’re about to land in the lake until the runway appears.
After we got off the plane, we saw a huge welcoming party all dressed in green and with a news camera, and we were trying to figure out who they were welcoming. After we got out of the airport on the other side, we found out that a governor of Tanzania had been on our flight with us, and we had delayed his arrival in Bukoba because we were late to Mwanza. We boarded a small bus to make the trip from the runway to the airport. We walked into the “passengers arrival lounge” which was a room about the size of my living room. It contained two wheelchairs and no other seats and was also where baggage claim took place. All checked luggage was loaded onto a truck and driven to the bottom of the steps outside the arrivals lounge, and a man carried the bags up the steps and set them inside the room to be claimed. There wasn’t even enough room for all of our group to stand in the same room to claim our bags at the same time. There was a sister of the church (not Lutheran like the sisters at the orphanage, but another denomination) who got impatient that she could not claim her bags right away and walked down the steps and grabbed her bags off the truck herself.
Our group’s connection to Bukoba was through the Johnson family from Prince of Peace. There are actually two separate Johnson families, but they are so close that they may as well be related. Rebekah and I thought they were one family when we first met them. Sue Johnson hired Smart at the bank she works at in Minnesota in 2001, and even though Smart has moved back to Tanzania, he is still good friends with both Johnson families. Smart has an amazing life story, but seeing as it took him almost an hour to tell it, it is way too long to try to write here. To give you a brief background, Smart came to the US in 1998 with $20, and by the time he left in 2007, he had gotten at least one college degree, worked at the bank for six years, and started a non-profit called COSAD (Community Solutions for Africa’s Development). When he moved back to Bukoba, it was to see his non-profit grow and actually start benefiting the community he had grown up in.
Outside the arrivals lounge, our guide while in Bukoba, Smart, was waiting to pick us up. Also with Smart were Israel, Jasper, and other members of the Imuka singers, which I will explain the importance of later. We loaded into the van and cars that Smart had brought to hold all of us. There was a huge procession waiting to take the governor to his destination in Bukoba, but Smart happened to know the governor so he talked to him and he let us go first.
We went to the hotel from the airport. Rebekah and I were assigned a room that overlooked the lake and had an absolutely huge bathroom attached to it. We had a king-sized bed to share. After dropping our things in our room, we loaded up the vehicles again and went to Smart’s house. Smart, his wife Jessica, and their son Abessica moved into the house three days before we arrived, so it was still having the finishing touches put on it. The six Johnsons stayed at Smart’s house, while the rest of the group stayed at the hotel.
After a light lunch at Smart’s, we went to visit one of COSAD’s libraries, which was named after Sue Johnson’s husband. After a visit there, we went to see the first step in one of Smart’s new projects called One Woman, One Goat. There is a shortage of goats in the region around Bukoba while there is a surplus in the Kilimanjaro region (which is where the orphanage and the town of Moshi are located). Smart’s idea is to raise money to buy goats and give them to local women. This would help to resolve the shortage of goats and also provide a livelihood for local women. After this we went back to the hotel to visit with Smart and the Imuka singers (explanation still to come on them) and to eat dinner.
Sunday 6/23
Sunday morning we went to church. The first service was just finishing when we arrived, so we stood outside during the after-church auction and then went in for church. After church there was another auction, and then we gathered all the gifts we had brought for the children. Justina, the principal of the school next to the library we had visited the day before, took the children into another building to hand out the gifts. There were pens, candy, bubbles, and other items. The children sang as Justina and a few others handed things out to them. After church, we made a quick stop at the hotel and then went to Smart’s house.
Now I will explain the Imuka singers. When Smart was a young man living in Bukoba with dreams of going to the US, he was a director of a choir. He raised money to pay for his one-way ticket to the US by taking his choir on tour. When he came to the US, he had a scholarship for a degree in music. He lost his scholarship because he decided he didn’t want a degree in music anymore, but music remained part of his life. When he returned to Bukoba to work with his non-profit full time, he still wanted music to be part of his life. He started the Imuka singers as part of COSAD, and there are now dozens of choirs supported by COSAD. Smart directs the Imuka singers, and the group has toured the US.
After lunch at Smart’s house, the Imuka singers and a local secondary school choir did a concert for us in Smart’s yard. Smart insisted that each member of our group stand up and introduce ourselves to the rest of the people gathered. Our group also sang a song as a thank you to the rest of the singers for their concert. The concert was beautiful, and afterward, we had a delicious buffet dinner outside. Rebekah and I sat with the secondary school students, and they asked us if we would ride along when a church elder took them back to school (it’s a boarding school). We said we would ask. We asked Pastor Chad and he said to talk to Smart. Smart agreed to let us go but said that we shouldn’t get out of the car and he was more comfortable with us going if Aaron from Prince of Peace came with us.
The three of us, a girl named Alice, and all 17 or so students piled into the 13-passenger van with our driver, the church elder. Aaron and Alice were both in the front seat and Rebekah and I were crammed into the back with the rest of the students. One girl had to sit on another student’s lap because there was not enough room. The whole way back to their school, the students were singing at the top of their lungs. Some songs we had just heard at the concert, and some others were new. When we arrived at school, we had to get out of the car to let people out even though Smart had said not to. One of the students still wanted me to write down my email address, so after I did that, the students pulled us up to where their headmaster was standing. He announced to all of us that the students had missed their curfew by two hours and that they were going to be punished. Aaron spoke for the three of us when he said that we were sorry they had missed their curfew and hoped they wouldn’t be punished.
We were dismissed after that, and we got back in the car with the driver. After we left the school, the driver said the students probably wouldn’t actually be punished which made us feel a little better. We returned to Smart’s house after a much quieter car ride than on the way to the school. Most of the crowd had dispersed by the time we got back, and the Imuka singers were singing again before our group left. After a song or two, the folks staying at the hotel loaded up the van for the trip back there. By the time we got back to the hotel, we were all very tired from the day’s festivities.
Monday 6/24
This morning I set my alarm to wake up to the see the sunrise over the lake. I actually got up when my alarm went off (around 6:30) and I was rewarded with a beautiful sunrise. I sat on the patio at the hotel and watched the horizon for almost an hour before anyone else came outside. Pastor Chad finally came out and almost immediately left for the beach. I didn’t follow him at first, but one of the hotel staff came back from the store and pointed to the path to the beach so I decided to follow. The girl from the hotel called this the “main road” to the beach but it was more like a small dirt path between some houses. I felt like I was trespassing on their land, but no one complained about it. I even got a few “good mornings” from some residents who were surprised to see a mzungu (white person) walking through their neighborhood. When I reached the beach, I got a stunning view of the sun over the lake. I took my shoes off and walked a little bit into the water. It wasn’t freezing, but it wasn’t the warmest either.
I finally drug myself away from the view on the beach and returned to the hotel for breakfast. Rebekah and I took another walk to the beach after breakfast because she hadn’t been awake for the sunrise. As we were finishing breakfast, Smart pulled up with the Johnsons. As we were about to leave for the airport, the van decided to break down. We were delayed by about a half hour while Smart called a friend to borrow another van. We could have been at the airport sooner than that if we had taken a couple trips in the cars, but Smart wanted us all to go together.
When we arrived at the airport, we found that they were not at all equipped to handle a group of our size. When we walked in the only door, we were immediately directed through security. We didn’t know what to do with our checked baggage so we left it outside security. When we got through, Pastor Chad started to check us all in. The lady at the check-in counter (which was actually a wooden table and a metal cart on wheels with a laptop and a printer) asked us where our checked luggage was and Pastor Chad pointed to where the pile was still sitting outside security. She said it needed to be with us still, so Pastor Chad told some members of our group who were still outside security to start sending our bags through. The lady at the table collected all our passports and started printing our boarding passes. I didn’t get one at first again, but she checked in her computer and printed mine.
We moved to the next room which was where we were supposed to wait until we left. Our tickets told us to check the monitors to see if our gate had been changed, but there were no monitors in sight and even if there were, there was only one gate, if you could even call it that. There was a door out of the waiting room onto a porch that had also seats to wait; there was a low gate in the fence around the porch with steps leading down to the taxi area for the planes. After a short wait, we were called for boarding. The same ladies who had just checked us in at the desk were standing at the top of the steps checking our boarding passes. There was a bus waiting at the bottom of the steps to take us the short distance to the plane. I guess it was too dangerous for us to walk there ourselves even though our flight was probably the only one leaving the whole day.
When we boarded the plane, the flight attendants told us we could sit wherever we wanted regardless of what our ticket said. Rebekah and I sat next to each other for the short flight. When we landed in Mwanza, we weren’t delayed like we were on Saturday so we actually had to go into the airport. When we got into the airport, we had to go to the outdoor seating area and wait for our next flight. There were some food stands along the side so some of us got a snack there. When it was time for our next flight, we had to go through security again on our way into the building. Once we got through security, we walked forward and took a left to our gate, only to find out we had to go through security again on our way into the gate area. We waited a few minutes in the gate area, and then our flight was announced for boarding. There was actually an overhead speaker system in this airport so they announced our flight number over that. Two guys checked our boarding passes as we walked out the door, and we took another bus to the plane.
Rebekah and I sat with each other again and there was an empty row across the aisle so I moved over there when we took off. Rebekah slept most of the way, and I worked on a picture slideshow on my computer. When we landed in Kilimanjaro and exited the plane, I was carrying the basket I had bought in Bukoba in my hand. One of the flight attendants had a bag with a few packets of cashews in the bottom, so he took out four or five and threw them in my basket. We hadn’t gotten a snack on this flight, but I guess that made up for it. We walked into the airport and out the other side to meet Nelson and Oscar. We loaded up our luggage into a van and got in our bus.
When we got back to the hotel, Chad announced that we were going to eat dinner at Kilimakyaro Lodge for the second time (in their nice garden) instead of at El Rancho which we would have been eating at for the third time and the environment there just wasn’t quite as nice. Rebekah and I went with the Johnsons to the Green Bamboo Barbecue to get something small to eat to hold us over until dinner. We both took showers to freshen up for dinner. We went to dinner at Kilimakyaro and Rebekah and I asked Sue and Ron Johnson to sit with them because it was our last dinner as a large group.
Tuesday 6/25
We had breakfast at the hotel in the morning. We left right after breakfast for the headquarters of the diocese for a presentation on Building A Caring Community (BCC). BCC operates day care centers for special needs children. They currently have a volunteer from New Zealand who is here until the fall who gave a presentation for us. BCC currently has 11 day care centers. They also have programs for the parents of the children. They train parents how to care for their child with special needs, and they also provide employment for mothers through the opportunity to make bags and jewelry to sell. We left the headquarters of the diocese to go visit a center. The volunteer from New Zealand said each center is unique, and the one we visited had about ten children.
When we left this center, we went into town for some souvenir shopping. While a few of us were on the bus outside one shop, a street vendor named Elvec came up to the open door and started talking to us. He liked that we were from the US because of Obama (which is a common theme here, especially with Obama’s visit to Tanzania on July 1st and 2nd). He told us that he was excited to speak to us because we are native English speakers and he is trying to improve his English. He finally pulled out his paintings to show us when Carol Zillmer asked if he was an artist, but I respected him for just talking to us first and only trying to sell us something after we asked about it. His paintings were actually very well done and each one was signed with his first name. I bought one that I liked, and by that time the rest of the group was back on the bus so we needed to go.
Our next stop was Amani home for street children. Street children have parents and a house but decided to leave home for some reason and end up on the street because they feel they have nowhere else to go. Because of this, Amani is not an orphanage. While we were there, there were only a few children there because it was the summer break from school. During the summer break, most of the children begin the process of reunification with their parents. They stay with their families for a month, and the stay is evaluated at the end of that month. If it is deemed successful, the children will stay with their families, and if there were problems, the children will come back to Amani. The goal at Amani is to house and educate the children for a couple years and then ultimately reunite them with family.
After our visit at Amani, we tried to go to lunch at 10 to 10 Pizza which we had eaten at before, but when we arrived they had much of the restaurant dismantled and were doing some remodeling. We went to Indo-Italiano in town instead, which is owned by the same guy as 10 to 10, so the menu is basically the same.
After this, we went back to the hotel to finish our packing. We all left the hotel to go back to the orphanage. When we got to the orphanage, Sue, Ron, and Brian Johnson helped Rebekah and I take our things to our room. We went back to where the rest of the group was standing to say our final goodbye. We had gotten so attached to the rest of the group, and it was very hard to say goodbye. I managed to hold back my tears until the bus pulled away and then I cried a little while we stood with Sister Elly. Rebekah and I went back to our rooms to unpack. I sat at Rebekah’s desk while she unpacked until dinner. We ate dinner and then came back to finish unpacking Rebekah’s room and then to unpack my stuff. We were both tired so we didn’t stay up much later than that.
I'm hoping to write a post about our time so far back at the orphanage and post it on Saturday, so look out for that! I was going to upload the slideshow for Bukoba with this post but the connection is really slow so I think I will have to add that on Saturday as well!
Until then,
Natalie
Monday 6/17
Monday morning we left for safari. We could not take all our luggage with us, so Rebekah and I shared a suitcase for safari, and the group left all extra luggage in one room at the hotel. After breakfast, our three drivers (Kakasii, Momo, and Peter) arrived with our safari vehicles. Our group split into the three cars. Rebekah and I got in Momo’s car with Jerry, Sue, Melissa, and Ron. First we went from the hotel outside Moshi west to Arusha along the Moshi-Arusha highway. On the way out of Moshi, we stopped at the Highway Supermarket for bottled water. A street vendor was trying to sell Jerry something by saying Jerry was his “brother from another mother.” He also said “Hakuna Matata” (which you should know from the Lion King means no worries) when Jerry said he didn’t want to buy anything.
On the other side of Arusha, we stopped at the Cultural Heritage Center. This is the largest souvenir shop I have seen in Tanzania, and attached is a very nice gallery with traditional African art. I didn’t buy anything in the souvenir shop, but Rebekah bought a mug. We walked over to the gallery, and I didn’t see the sign when we walked in that I wasn’t supposed to take pictures of the artwork. Rebekah told me halfway through, but I continued to take pictures anyway. All of the artwork was for sale, but everything was way too expensive for me to consider getting (no matter how much I wanted some of the pieces).
After leaving Arusha, we continued driving on the Trans-African road, which is 11,000 km and stretches from “Cape to Cairo” (as Momo said). We stopped at the Tembo Club for a buffet lunch. Tembo means elephant in Kiswahili, and the building that the restaurant was in was shaped like an elephant, complete with a water feature trunk and grass covering the entire roof. They had nice grounds and the food was delicious.
We continued westward along the Trans-African road. There was a 130-km stretch under construction, so we were diverted to the old Trans-African road, which is very bumpy. The original road was built in 1950, and then in 1988, the new road was laid next to it. It is now being completely rebuilt. The project was started 3 months ago and is expected to take a year and a half to complete. We passed two Chinese bicyclists with saddle bags on their bicycles, and Momo explained that many people, especially Chinese, bike the Trans-African roadway in its entirety.
Along the way, Momo pointed out the Rift Valley Escarpment, a mountain range that stretches from Jordan to Mozambique and which was created by volcanic activity. About 110 km to the north of the Trans-African road along the escarpment is Ol Doinyo Lengai, a volcano holy to the Maasai tribe. The Maasai believe that God lives at this volcano. There is a lake near the volcano called Lake Natron, which is popular with Italians. There was a famous Italian explorer who had a skin disease and took a safari to the lake. He showered where two rivers meet and form a waterfall near the lake and was cured of his skin disease. According to Momo, many Italians like to go there and take a shower.
Here is some other information about tribes in Tanzania that we learned from Momo along the way. There are 125 different tribes in Tanzania. The Sumuka tribe is the largest. The Maasai are the nomadic herders that many people have probably seen in pictures even if they have never been to Tanzania. They are actually one of the smaller tribes in Tanzania, but they need a lot of land to graze cattle so they take up a lot of space. Earlier in the spring, there were negotiations happening between the Maasai and the Tanzanian government over a land-use issue. A hunting company from the UAE that caters to rich Europeans wanted to take Maasai grazing land for more hunting land. Just two weeks ago, an agreement was reached and the Tanzanian government said they would not allow the company to take the land.
Later in the afternoon, we stopped in the village of Mto wa Mbu, which means Mosquito River. This town is special because it is where all 125 Tanzanian tribes can be found. There is a Maasai market there that sells wood carvings, jewelry, blankets, and other items. There we met Christopher, a friend of Pastor Chad’s and a shop owner in the market. I bought a drum after bargaining with a shop owner.
After our stop at the market, we had about another hour to go to our lodging for the night. Rebekah decided we both wanted to ride shotgun, so we both crammed into the front seat next to Momo. After a bit of a bumpy ride up a dirt road, we arrived at Rhotia Valley Tented Lodge. We were greeted by a volunteer from Holland named Evelyn, and a staff member brought us warm towels to wipe the dust off our faces and arms. We gathered round for a briefing on the protocol for walking around at night (basically always have an escort with you unless you’re in your tent or in the dining tent). After being taken to our tent, Rebekah and I made a walking video tour of the area around our tent and took some pictures of the view. At dinner, we sat with our three drivers (Kakasii, Momo, and Peter) and Marilyn and Will from Prince of Peace. When we got back to our tent, we found that our warm water bottles had been brought to our bed to keep our feet warm while we slept.
Tuesday 6/18
The next morning, we continued our journey westward toward Ngorongoro Crater and the Serengeti. Rebekah and I were in Kakasii’s car. We passed through the gate to Ngorongoro Conservation Area and started the drive up to the rim of the crater. We saw baboons as soon as we passed the gate. Our next stop was a viewpoint on the rim of the crater. They are building a porch there, but it is not yet completed, so there was no railing between us and the crater floor. It’s a very long steep drop from the rim of the crater into the bottom.
After reaching the rim of the crater, we drove around on the rim for a little while, and then started our descent down the other side. We saw our first zebra and wildebeest, and we saw many Maasai herders grazing their cattle. A few times when we stopped, we had Maasai children come up to the car asking us to take their picture for money. We also saw an ostrich and some giraffes before lunch.
We stopped for lunch at Oldupai Gorge. The gorge is where the earliest evidence of human development has been found. Researchers from international universities do ongoing research at the site, and there were tents set up for this purpose while we were there. We ate lunch at the picnic area overlooking the gorge, and a man gave us a talk on the archaeological importance of the crater.
After lunch, we continued driving toward the Serengeti. We stopped at a Maasai boma (village). Upon our arrival there, we were immediately welcomed with a dance. The four of us teenage girls got pulled into the dance, and Rebekah was looking a little uneasy about the whole thing at first because she wasn’t expecting that. I had visited a Maasai village in 2009 and experienced the same thing so I knew what was coming. Pretty soon, though, we were both enjoying the dance, and we tried to imitate what the Maasai women were doing with the necklaces around their neck. After the welcome dance, we were split into smaller groups with a Maasai who spoke English. Rebekah, Jerry, Ron, and I went with Emmanuel. He is married and has one child. He goes to college in Arusha (the city we passed through on Monday), and he wants to be a doctor so that he can return to help his tribe. He took us into his hut and talked about the Maasai for a little while. After we came out, he took us around to see all the jewelry for sale in the hope that we would buy some.
After the Maasai village, we continued our drive toward the edge of the Serengeti where our lodge for the next two nights was. Along the way, we disrupted a group of ostriches who ran beside our vehicles for a little while. We also saw some gazelle and impala. Just before we reached the lodge, Peter spotted a giraffe on another road and we took a detour that took us very close to the giraffe.
We arrived at Ndutu Safari Lodge and were shown to our rooms. Ndutu Safari Lodge is named after nearby Lake Ndutu, and it is located on the border between Ngorongoro Conservation Area and the Serengeti. We dropped our stuff in our room and almost immediately left again. We had a couple hours before it got dark, so our drivers took us on a game drive around the lodge. Rebekah and I went in Momo’s vehicle. We went around Lake Ndutu and found two elephants in a marsh. We kept going to find what we were looking for: a pack of four lionesses and ten cubs. We parked next to the lions and stayed for over an hour watching them. The sun set behind us as we watched them, but no one cared about the pretty sunset when there were 14 lions on the other side of the car.
We went back to the lodge to clean up before dinner. One thing that is hard to explain to people unless they have experienced it is the amount of dust that you accumulate on your body in the course of a day on safari. The windows on the safari truck are usually at least cracked open so that it doesn’t get too hot so dust pours into the car as we drive down the dirt roads. We went and ate dinner and then hung out in the lounge until we went to bed.
Wednesday 6/19
After breakfast on Wednesday, we drove by Lake Ndutu to see the flamingos. Rebekah and I were with Peter. We drove up from the shore of the lake toward the Serengeti. On our way up a particularly steep hill, Kakasii’s truck got stuck in a deep rut in the road. We all had to get out and stand to the side while the three drivers decided how to pull out the truck. When we got up that hill finally, we continued to the gate to the Serengeti. The land flattened out very quickly and soon we were on flat grassland. The gate to the Serengeti sits at the bottom of a hill that is the only hill in sight. You can walk up to the top and get a great view of the surrounding grassland.
For the next few hours until lunch, we just drove into the Serengeti looking for animals. We saw giraffes, wildebeest, lions, a dead hyena, a lioness who climbed out of her tree to try to hunt gazelle, zebra, elephants who crossed the road right in front of our car, heartbeast, and a leopard. We stopped for lunch at the Serengeti visitor’s center. After lunch, we went to the hippo pool. There was also a crocodile there.
Because we ate lunch late, we had to start heading back to Ndutu lodge after lunch. By this time we were a few hours drive from our lodge and we hadn’t even made it to the far side of the Serengeti. On the way back, we saw more zebra, elephants, lions, and heartbeast, and we saw a live hyena.
Thursday 6/20
We had to pack up everything to leave this morning because we weren’t coming back to Ndutu again. After breakfast, we loaded up the trucks. Rebekah and I went in Kakasii’s car. Right after we left the lodge, we saw a family of hyenas with babies. Soon after that we saw warthogs, a jackal, and a secretary bird. We went back to the rim of the crater and started our descent in. It was a little frightening for those in our group who didn’t like heights. Once we reached the floor of the crater, we saw wildebeest, cape buffalo, gazelle, and zebra. We saw a hyena with two babies that was trapped by safari vehicles near a pond. They were crying to each other trying to figure out how to get out. We saw some sort of snake hidden in a tuft of grass. We saw two hippos out of water lying in the grass.
It was very cold in the morning, but we expected it to warm up by lunch. It didn’t. We stopped for lunch by a pond. There was a lion nearby that some other people went to see, but I don’t think anyone in our group walked over there. I bonded with a stranger outside the bathroom about how cold it was because he was wearing a hat and mittens. I was a tad jealous because I only had a rain coat and was wearing shorts and a t-shirt.
When we continued on from lunch, we saw a very large herd of zebra and wildebeest. We drove toward the other side of the crater and could see our lodge up on the rim. We drove past a vehicle that had broken down and stopped to help. The passengers of the other vehicle were standing outside smoking cigarettes and drinking cans of beer (Kilimanjaro Lager) waiting for their car to be repaired so they could continue on their way. We kept going a little further to see black rhino. These are rare in the crater, and they were too far in the distance for me to get a decent picture. We sat and watched them for a while, but they didn’t come any closer.
After this, we started our ascent out of the crater. Along the way, we saw some Maasai with camels. When we had turned on the road to our lodge and were maybe a minute from the gate, we saw an elephant on the side of the road. That was a pleasant surprise. When we arrived at the lodge, we discovered that they had a huge balcony along the entire length of the restaurant/lounge/lobby area that looked over the rim of the crater. We discovered that we also had a crater view from our room. If we sat on our beds and looked out our window, we couldn’t see anything but the crater floor because we were that close to the rim.
Dinner was a buffet with really good food. After dinner, we didn’t stay in the lobby area very long because it was so cold. Rebekah and I both went to bed fairly early.
Friday 6/21
I set my alarm to wake up to see the sunrise over the crater, but when my alarm went off, I saw that it was too cloudy and foggy to see it. It was hard to even see the trees under our window outside because it was so foggy. After a delicious breakfast buffet, we loaded up the vehicles again. Rebekah and I went in Peter’s truck with the other young people. We drove away from the crater and out through the Ngorongoro Conservation Area gate that we had come through on the way in. Our first stop was at the T-Shirt Shack, a little round building that sells t-shirts and other souvenirs.
Our next stop was Kakasii’s home in Arusha. We met his wife, Brenda, who is from Nebraska, and his two and a half year old twins, Ellie and Max. We had soft drinks there and visited for a little while, and then we continued on to our lunch destination: Arumeru River Lodge. We invited Peter to sit with us but he said he couldn’t because he knew he was going to have to say goodbye to us in a few hours and he needed to think about what he was going to say to us. We had a nice buffet at Arumeru and then continued on to Moshi. We returned to Lutheran Uhuru Hotel in Moshi. We ate a buffet dinner at El Rancho after having some time at the hotel. We had to unpack from safari and repack for our trip to Bukoba, and then we went to bed.
Check out the pictures below, and a post of our trip to Bukoba will be coming soon!
Natalie
