The first week back at the orphanage!

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...