Dar es Salaam na Zanzibar Part II

Here are some of the surprising highlights from Zanzibar:

1. Stink Fruit! We had been hearing rumors about a fruit called doriani, a fruit so repulsive smelling that it is banned from many hotels and public spaces, a fruit rumored to be so strong that you could tell up to 3 days later that one had been in the vicinity. However, we had also been told that this fruit was absolutely delicious, so when we saw them on the side of the road, we decided to give it a try. We first asked if we would eat it at an outside restaurant, thinking that it would be alright in the open air, but the waiter took one look at the fruit and got a terrified expression on his face, waving his arms frantically in the air to tell us to get away. So, perhaps unwisely, we snuck it into our hotel room. We had an outside balcony and so we went out there, and used our room key to cut it open. Instantly one of the most repulsive smells, like a combination of a public bathroom and rotting onions spewed out. We kept cutting and got to the gooey edible inside. Making a face I tried unsuccessfully to get it to my mouth without getting it near my nose. It was sweet. This is true, but the texture was the worst oozy slime and the taste was a sweeter version of the smell, like honey coated public bathroom... in your mouth. My friends agreed, and we quickly ran inside, only to discover that the smell would not leave the room nor our hands. When we turned the room key in 3 days later, it still smelled like stink fruit.

2. Giant Tortoises! We got to feed 500 year old giant turtles. On a small island off of Zanzibar there is a tortoises preservation refuge to keep them from being hunted. They were huge, often over 600 pounds, and the closest things to dinosaurs I have ever seen. They would come meandering up and stand up on their hind legs to stretch their necks out and get leaves from our hands.

3. Monkeys! On Zanzibar, there is a kind of money called kima kunju, which are found nowhere else in the world. They have also been so exposed to people that they are entirely unafraid. You can sit right next to them and they just continue eating leaves and completely ignore you. Some of the little kids even poked them and they would just move over a little bit. I felt a bit bad for the little monkeys to be bothered by so many cameras and tourists, but frankly they didn't seem to care at all. We saw baby monkeys hanging onto their moms and monkeys swinging from trees two feet away and just monkeys doing everything that monkeys do!

4. We also went snorkeling, got to play with plants that when you touch them they immediately shrivel up and pretend to be dead, and we got to go to a spice farm and see and taste all sorts of amazing kinds of spices and fruits and see how they grow.

Love you all and I'll write soon when I'm back in Arusha!

Dar es Salaam na Zanzibar

Zanzibar is absolutely gorgeous. There is no other way to describe it. We took a ferry ride from mainland Dar es Salaam in the early morning hours and watched the reddest sunrise I have even seen as the boat moved along the bluest of water. Decorated with white sand beaches and beautiful oldarchitecture, we got to see the landing place of some of the first western explorers, including a favorite spot of David Livingstone. Zanzibar is also quite a place of contradiction, of old old buildings next to 5 star hotels, of beautifully patterned Muslim women covered head to toe next to young girls in booty shorts and spaghetti straps. Zanzibar is gorgeous and the locals have realized that nearly every aspect of their life is marketable. Every street is filled with shops. Nearly every boat is rentable for excursions, and if you get lost you can pay locals to help you get back to your hotel.

Look! We are engineers too!

There is a group of undergraduate and graduate engineering students here in Tanzania with us doing a program through Duke University. They learn about medical devices in the developing world, and on Fridays they go to hospitals and help fix broken hospital devices. It is really an amazing idea, as they also train the locals about fixing and maintaining devices, and when possible, they try to engineer ways to adapt first world devices for the third world. For example, some devices require expensive disposable pads or gels, unavailable here. However, one student discovered that aloe vera has the correct conductivity to be a perfect replacement for a particular gel, and is widely and cheaply available, transforming the adaptability of this machine. Anyway, so the program is great, and they are taking basic Swahili, but they don't know much, so we got to be their translators today!

This was my first opportunity to be a translator, and I really enjoyed it, and I think we were actually helpful. Most of the doctors spoke very good English, but when communicating with the engineer at the hospital and some of the nurses we were put to good use. "What were you doing when this broke" and such questions were aplenty.

Outside of the hospital the engineers set to work, screws and tubes everyone and calls for needle nose players or transformers or multimeters filled the air. For the other Swahili students, I think this scene of taken apart machinery all over the place was quite the sight, but as the smell of solder filled the air and talk of volts and switches and circuit boards and rewiring filled my ears I felt a familiar sense of home.

I "helped" work on a suction pump and a head loop lamp.

:) This pictures are for you, my engineering bro! I thought about you a lot today. You would have really liked it, and you would have fixed tons of stuff!

-Laura

Daily Life

I realized with all my pictures of magical sanddunes

and phosphorescent lizards, I haven't written about what my life is like a day to day basis, so here we go!

Picture 1: An example of my freckles. Yes Mom, I am wearing sunscreen, but I still have acquired lots of dots on my face which confuse the Tanzanians here. "What's wrong with your face?" is a question I have been asked more than one. My life here is a life with freckles.

Picture 2: Macaroni and Cheese- Two GIANTS POTS. We decided to cook our family American food, so we attempted macaroni and cheese, garlic bread, and meatballs. Without electricity though, using a charcoal stove with one burner was a challenge. We made WAY too many noodles, forgetting how much noodles expand when cooked. We wanted to make rice Krispies, but one box of Rice Krispies was almost $15, and marshmallows are not available, so we gave up. One of our host brothers took one look at our food and refused to eat, but the others ate and thanked us. It was fun, but I think they definitely like their own food better! My life here is amazing African food and bad American food imitations.

Picture 3: TCDC- This is the school where we stay each day. It is a little paradise, with little shaded huts and tea served twice a day. Even the workers are paid to talk to the students in Swahili. They hold fake meetings and act out plays using vocabulary from our class. It is an amazing school, but it is definitely a bit utopian. My life here is utopian.

Picture 4: Crowded Transportation: Especially on the way home from school, we pack in with half the people sitting on the seats and the other half sitting on their laps. 45 minutes later, enough people have left that we finally all get our own seats :) My life here is crowded.

Picture 5: The Darkness: This picture shows me wearing a headlamp and then I have stuck another flashlight under the band of the headlamp in order to have two lights to read my homework. The whole country is up in arms about the problem of electricity. The country is almost entirely powered by hydropower, and there has been a lack of water this year, so electricity is a real problem. We usually have it either early in the morning or late evening, but never both and even having electricity during the day for businesses to be able to function has been a struggle. My life here is darkness and following the sun early to bed and early to rise.

More Safari Pictures

Here are a few of my other favorite safari pictures :) Photo credits to my awesome friend Mary-Alison.

Almost Petted a Lion

Driving along, our safari van had to stop because the road was blocked. With what? A sleeping male lion, of course! I opened my window and took a picture, literally two and a half feet away from a lion! If I had wanted (to lose an arm) I could have leaned a bit farther out the window and petted the lion. We encountered other road blocks along the way, including a herd of elephants :)

The dust was crazy, as was the view down into the crater as we descended to see all the animals.

Sending you all an elephant hug!

-Laura

Maasai

Through the countryside, desert and tiny Massai villages sprinkling the otherwise barren area with the bright red of their clothing. Along the way, we stopped at one of the most amazing natural occurrences I have ever seen. It is a sand dune peaking up from an otherwise flat area, and the sand dune magically moves 17 meters each year. The Maasai keep track and mark how far it moves, amazingly staying completely together, partly due to the fact that the sand is in fact magnetic. The sand dune is a sacred place to them. They make animal sacrifices and pray there, and they are honored that people come from around the world to see their holy place.

However, driving through the Maasai area was also morally conflicting. Small Maasai children would come up to our car, even mothers with small children, and they would ask for us to take pictures and would ask for money. On one side, they were all so beautiful, and we wanted to capture the beauty of their clothing and culture, and I felt it was more fair than taking pictures without them knowing, but yet it felt somehow artificial and wrong to be taking pictures of people, just like the elephants and giraffes we passed.

We also visited Olduvai, where LUCY was discovered along with some of the oldest human remains known to man. (I am standing in front of the excavation sight in the picture).

Tanzania is BEAUTIFUL!

Saba Saba

Today was amazing. It was Saba Saba, meaning the 7th of July, in which Tanzanians celebrate small farmers and businessmen. There are huge trade fairs in the cities, and it is a national holiday, so we got the afternoon off.

As quoted by Heather during "muda binafsi" (literally self-time) "we found a couch" and we sat outside and read :)

When we got homes, we went for a walk for hours around our neighborhood, and our brother made Hannah and Cecelela lead us, while he and I pretended to be tourists. We walked everywhere, asking lots of questions, like whether the cows crossing the road were lions and if all Tanzanians lived in huts and hunted elephants :) We took lots of pictures too, and we laughed and ran through forests and cornfields under the giant shadow of the looming mountain above.

A lot of the neighborhoods through which we passed were Maasai areas, and for once we were not the ones that felt like outsiders. A lot of the Maasai didn't even know basic greetings, and when the kids did respond, even we noticed their very different accents.

Off for a weekend safari to see all sorts of wonderfully fantastic animals :)

Bye from beautiful Tanzania!

-Laura

Happy 4th of July!

Today was a little piece of America. My friend Heather and I walked around for an hour and a half doing a three-legged race practice. As you can see in our picture, we even played soccer and volleyball with our legs tied together. The kitchen took requests, and we had hamburgers and hotdogs, potato salad and ice cream. Admittedly, all these items still had some African flare, but the Americans all thought it was great! However, we did notice that none of the Tanzanians seemed to like our nation's food...

In the evening we had a talent show and people sang tons of beautiful songs. I showed off my hand walking and juggling skills :)

We also attempted s'mores. Apparently the concept of Graham Crackers is also foreign, so we used biscuits. They built a GIANT FIRE, maybe a little too big... We felt like we were trying to roast marshmallows on a forest fire. We couldn't get within three feet of the fire. There is a group of engineers here, and we worked together using marshmallows as glue to create longer sticks for roasting. We laid on the ground and covered our faces like we learned you do when escaping a burning house, and even then, only a few marshmallows reached their golden brown potential.

4th of July Tanzanian style!

HAPPY 4th of JULY!!!!

Weekend

This weekend we helped out around the house. We washed our clothes in buckets and hung them out to dry. Apparently we didn't do a very good job of wringing out our clothes, though because our host mom took them all down and rung them out again so that they would stop dripping. We walked around the neighborhood, and very near to our houses are two huge mining holes. All around the top of the hole, women sat with huge piles of rocks and a hammer, breaking them into pieces all day in the sun for only $2 a day. I felt very thankful that that was not my job. What a horrible way to spend ones life, but it is major industry, and many are employed to do this work.

We learned how to make chapati pancakes, and at night we had a talent show. All the kids did an act, from singing and dancing to storytelling. Hannah and I wrote a story about a giraffe bigger than Mount. Meru, and I acted it out, making scary faces, juggling things, and walking on my hands. We were a big hit.

Then, Sunday before the sun had risen, through complete darkness we walked through the banana fields on small dirt paths, the light slowly beginning to pour through the tops of the trees. Our family is Catholic, and so we went to the first mass. We were the only white people there, and apparently last week Hannah had to introduce herself in front of everyone. There was lots of singing and clapping and standing up and sitting down, and it was a beautiful sight to see so many people gathered together so early to share their thanks, beliefs, worries, and prayers.

Fading Sunset

We stayed late today to celebrate one of the girls' birthday (Happy birthday Heather!), and we got a chance to walk around outside of the school. Walking back at sunset, the mountains and hills were colored as bright as a coloring book, and children played soccer under the fading light.