Back to Nyamaguku

Monday morning we got in the car just after 8:00 to head to the village. We head out of Musoma, drive east then north. Over the Mara River on a small suspension bridge then we take a left off of the paved roads. We start out far too fast because one bump sends Peter and me, sitting on the padded benches attached to the sides in back of the Land Cruiser, to the ceiling, hitting our heads. From that point we slow down to a more reasonable speed for the dirt road.
We turn off the road onto a bike path and over what, some parts of the year, would be used as a field to grow something. The house we come to has electric lines going to it: one of only two in the village – this is Chacha’s house. We get out of the car and greet him. His children – or maybe grandchildren – are curious but slightly frightened of us and they keep their distance. Chacha gets in the front seat with my mom and Justin and we head off.
At the first house we visit, the owner, a teacher, and his wife greet us and show us around. My mom starts out by asking questions, through Justin who serves as the translator, about the system. He likes it but he needs more lights, he says. I try to take pictures of the meeting as I had been instructed but the close quarters of the living room make it difficult. We follow the owner into a hallway where, up on the rafters, is the controller and battery. I take some more pictures as Peter checks the voltage of the battery and solar panel.
All of the visits followed more or less this same pattern. We drive to the house or walk there from the last one and greet the owner. We ask them questions while Peter does all of the voltage checking. All the while I am taking pictures. I take pictures as we approach the house, as we walk between houses, as Peter checks the voltage, as my mom and Justin ask the usual array of questions. When I first heard that my mom was going to go back out to the village, I didn’t expect to be going along; after all I am not really part of her non-profit here. But my mother needs pictures for the website and whatever else the company would have for promotion. And for that she needs a photographer. That’s me.
I am not really much of a photographer. I have never used a nice camera of either the digital or film varieties. So what am I doing with my mom’s brand-new-for-the-trip Cannon Rebel T1i? I had spent the day before familiarizing myself with the thing so at least I won’t waste time with that, but I still am lost when it comes to exposure and aperture settings. Luckily I can let the camera deal with that and I leave it on “creative auto” setting.
The day becomes very repetitive. The first few houses are actually in a neighboring village to nyamaguku but everywhere they tell the same story. They need more lights. The lights aren’t bright enough. The battery is losing capacity. They want a phone charger. They want a TV. All of these are fixable in the near future, except maybe the last one, which would require a much larger system than the 10-watt, 4 light ones installed here. We drive off of the normal dirt road onto bicycle/foot paths that were never meant for cars to visit all of the houses with the solar light systems installed. Luckily the Toyota Land Cruiser is made for that kind of terrain and takes it in stride. We see a lot of houses and ask a lot of questions (and get a few answers many times). Around lunchtime, one of the customers is a bar and we stop for a soda.
Most of the customers are just normal families, though. Many times, just the woman is home, and the kids who stay away from us for the most part. There are animals at many of the houses, too. Mostly they’re chickens around – or even in – the house, or a dog or cat but there are even a group of cows gathered in the shade of one house. One of our customers has little pigeon houses set up under the eaves of his house. The last house we visit (I remember being told last year that he was the richest in the village) has many goats and cows penned up next to the house, which weren’t there when we visited last year – gone grazing or getting water.
After visiting 19 houses and taking over 300 pictures, we drop Chacha back at his house and start heading back to Musoma, stopping at a couple more houses along the way. By the time we get to the last house, it was 4:30 and I was ready to get back to Musoma. I wasn’t feeling well and I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. Besides, I knew the last house that we would go to and I distinctly remember finding the man’s manner rude and dismissive when we were there last year. I keep my objections to myself and we turn off the road. This is the worst path yet. Maybe it seemed longer because I was so ready to be done, but there definitely weren’t plants scraping against the side of the car on any of the other paths, and I don’t think that they were this bumpy.
The last meeting is like the others for the most part: same complaints but maybe with a bit less of the niceness. Although at first I thought I had gotten a bad impression of him last year, it doesn’t take me long to remember why I found him disagreeable. Luckily, the meeting is over soon enough and we head back to Musoma. I took 345 pictures throughout the day but there is no proof that I was actually there at all.

Coming Home – to Musoma

First, the compound. Since it’s the same house we stayed in last time we were here it feels immediately like home. There are some compromises that we have to make here, but we have hot water, electricity and, when the antenna gets installed, internet. Some things have changed since I was here last year. Most obviously, 250 boxes containing 3000 solar lights fill part of the living room and we now have a dining table and chairs.
From the road, the first changes are the painted signs on the wall outside the compound for Tanzsolar and Juasolar, my mom’s company and its partner that is affiliated with Juasun, Robi’s Internet company, and does the installations for Tanzsolar. Inside the compound, the new headquarters for those two companies is visible in the new paint job on the small building in the back that was not in use last time I was here. It now has yellow paint halfway up the walls and is labeled “Ofisi ya Tanzsolar/Juasolar” – office of Tanzsolar/Juasolar. There are also solar panels strewn over the lawn, charging two-dozen solar lights on weekdays. There is also a white car that is partway hidden under the tree on the side of the house.
Being the company offices, the house constantly has at least one person during the week. They had been using our kitchen while we weren’t here and my mother quickly took that back over, giving them one electric hot plate and hot water kettle to use. We meet the new guard – we have one guard in the day and two at night now. Markus and Daniela, who live in the smaller house on the compound, are nice as ever.
The first day we get settled in. My mom sorts out all of her luggage and makes piles for Robi, Kilimanjaro and everything for her. We have no food in the house so we eat peanut balls – like giant versions of the peanut clusters in cracker jacks but spiced with pepper because they were a gift from Robi – for breakfast with our tea. We then get on our bikes and go to the market to fix the lack of food.
Having spent almost a month here last year, I am very familiar with Musoma and it hasn’t changed in the past year. We bike to one of the entrances to the market and lock up our bikes then walk through the narrow gap between the two shops and into the market. As always, there are counters full of fruits and vegetables and baskets hang from the roofs above some of the counters. Through the fruit counters there can be seen the rice and grains on the other side of the market. We walk through the market buying whatever looks good, filling out backpacks with a watermelon, cucumbers, green bell peppers and some small bananas. Going to the shops surrounding the market we also get peanut butter, tea, milk and bread.
It is suggested to us to begin taking classes at the language school and we bike out to the school, a long-ish journey that is certainly not flat. We talk to Father Edward, who is in charge there, and arrange to start classes the following week with a Sister Mary who will be arriving from India soon. The classes are going to be at least all morning long, every morning and I am not sure yet how that will change my plans of working for Juasun.
After finishing at Shule ya Lugha Makoko, the language school Makoko, we head past our house and toward town. Instead of going all the way to town we turn off to the right and down a familiar dirt road, past some shops and a sports stadium to Juasun’s office. We greet the familiar faces and sit down with our computers to use the internet. Having to bike to Juasun to use the internet is inconvenient but until the antenna, which my mom sent nearly a month ago and only just arrived, gets installed, the compound is without internet.
The first day in Musoma reminds me most of all of one thing: we would be bicycling a lot while we are here. Especially going to language school every day, my legs (and butt), which already after one day’s biking are complaining when I encounter a hill, would have to get used to the exercise.

Crossing the Country by Bus

Unlike waking up to go to Zanzibar, this one was painful. 4:00 is early no matter what schedule you’re on. We each take a very quick, cold shower and begin lugging the bags downstairs. My mom calls Rogers, the taxi driver (who should be here by now – it’s 4:35 and we told him to come at 4:30) as I continue carrying the luggage downstairs. Rogers arrives (late – he had forgotten) and we try to stuff all the bags into the car. This taxi, also a Toyota Corolla although a newer model, appears to not have as large a trunk as the last one because this time I am sharing the front seat with quite a few of our bags.
When we get to the Mohammed Trans Ltd. bus office, our bags are weighed in at 120 kg total, not including the backpacks we would carry on the bus with us. It honestly isn’t all our fault that we have so much luggage: my mom, as always, is carrying stuff for not only her company but for Robi’s as well. Either way, we are charged 95,000 Tsh (Tanzanian shillings: about 1300 per dollar at today’s exchange rates) for the 80 kilos excessive luggage. This is the reason we are taking the bus instead of flying – it would have cost even more to fly with it.
We get on the bus and settle into our seats on the left side of the bus where there are two seats per row as opposed to the three seats per row across the aisle from us. The seats are small and my knees rush against the seat in front of me. Although we head out of the parking lot at the scheduled time of 5:45, when we go across the street to the bus station. We sit there for an hour for no reason that I could discern as I doze in my seat and when we actually get on the road, it is 7:00.
I sleep for most of the next hour, looking sleepily out the window when I wake every so often, seeing the tropical plants and palm trees, simple dwellings appearing less often as we leave the city. When I finish with the Joshua Radin that I have on my iPod, I switch to some music by The Album Leaf: perfect sleeping music. I decide I can sleep no longer at 8:00 and switch to some Plushgun to begin waking up. I spend half an hour simply gazing out the window at the land we travel past. It is still lush and tropical but with fewer people than before.
The bus slows for a weigh station and outside, men hold up food and drinks to the bus windows, selling cashews or sodas and water. Our window, unfortunately, does not open, so we ask the person seated behind us, a nice man who knows some English, to buy us some of the little cakes. He leans out the window and gets one of the sellers’ attention. We look on as the men outside scramble to find change while at the same time trying to keep up with the bus, which is moving slowly up in the line. We finally get the muffins and change, thank the man behind us and eat a couple of the cakes. I take out my book and begin to read The Best of Roald Dahl while listening to some Eve 6.
I look up at the end of each short story to watch the land change from the wet tropical vegetation of the coast to a drier climate. I notice rows of what looks like agave (do they grow agave here?) and scattered trees of a variety that has a gigantic trunk and apparently looses its leaves this time of year – although I don’t know if this can be called winter, it is the cooler time of year. We stop at the bus station in Morogoro, people selling food, drinks and phone credits to the passengers through the window. We then leave the bus station, which takes a while: the area is packed with busses. The bus makes a quick stop at the office of the bus company to pick up a few more passengers and we continue on our way through the country.
I finish a short story and look out the window. This time I see more buildings than I had seen since leaving Dar. They aren’t large buildings but I we are approaching the capital of Tanzania, Dodoma. We go through the same routine as we had done in Morogoro through the bus station. The city is smaller than Dar in size and population and the buildings here are not as tall as those in Dar. Having driven all the way through, it’s hard to believe that that was the capital of the country. The bus stops at a gas station and we get out and buy some apples and water.
The bus ride continues uneventfully for a while until the bus veers off the road. The road across the country is not yet complete so we begin driving on a bumpy dirt road. The landscape is very dry at this point and every vehicle on the road kicks up dust. We occasionally get caught behind a gas truck, making the drive that much more unpleasant, but we pass them pretty quickly, never staying behind them for long. Nonetheless, the dust means that it isn’t wise to open the windows, not that ours opens anyhow, and it is stifling inside the bus. The new paved road being built– gravel with cement drainage pipes visible at the moment – can be seen beside the dirt road that we traverse; sometimes we drive right next to it and at other times the dirt road carries us out of sight.
The bumping of the dirt road shakes anything that I have on my lap onto the floor – including my phone. Luckily I manage to find it during the first stop after the bus leaves the dirt road. The dirt road does end eventually and my mother breathes a sigh of relief next to me as we drive back onto paved road after around 100 km of dirt road that the bus had taken at around 45 mph.
Stopping a handful of other times after that, we drive on into the night. Once the sun had set, I could no longer read my book though I didn’t try the light and we use a splitter to both listen to a book on my mom’s iPod, which turns out to not be very good. We switch to The Album Leaf and we doze off. Even after the sun had set, I am overheating and very sweaty in my seat (I know, very pleasant). Without the ability to open our window there is nothing we can do to ease our discomfort for the remaining hours.
When we reach Mwanza, it is 11:30 and I wake up to the street lamps and buildings. We text Robi, who would be picking us up when we reach Musoma, to tell him that we were in Mwanza and we’d be getting there late. Mwanza is at least a two and a half hour bus ride from Musoma so it was obvious we wouldn’t be getting in at the 12:00 time that the bus company had told us. Unlike the last time I took the bus from Mwanza, in the darkness nothing was visible. If anyone had electricity, I slept through that section of the drive.
It was such a relief when we got to Musoma at 2:00 and I could finally get off the bus after almost 20 solid hours of sitting there. The night air felt so wonderful, I didn’t even mind lugging the bags to the car, a little SUV with enough room for all of the stuff in the back. The dogs greet us when we get home to the compound and it is a huge relief to finally be able to unpack after the long trip – and to sleep in a bed after the long bus ride.

Zanzibar!

This is an exciting milestone for this blog (after all it is in the name) so please excuse the length of the post. I just didn’t know what to leave out.

Waking up at 5:45 wasn’t hard: since arriving in Tanzania I’ve adjusted to a very early schedule. I haven’t needed to get up early, but without anything for which to stay up late I have just continued with the early nights of the first day of jet lag. The convenient thing about this is that it was easy to wake up in time to shower and meet the taxi in time to get to the ferry by 6:30.
I read on the ferry ride, a book off the English shelf in our host Susan’s rather large collection (I didn’t want to read through the few books I had brought too quickly). It was an uneventful trip to Zanzibar, the bright blue seas quite calm in the sunny morning. We pushed our way off the boat and onto the shore, and went through customs (“for statistical reasons”) although Zanzibar is the same country as Tanzania (and the reason it is no longer called Tanganyika). As expected, a taxi driver was on us immediately offering us a tour of Stone Town, the main town of Zanzibar, and to drive us to a spice tour. We negotiated for the spice tour and, rather than the tour of Stone Town, which we would explore tomorrow, a drive to the beach. After some bargaining, we headed off and got in what turned out to be a seven-passenger van that my mother and I would have all to ourselves.
Stopping once for some sort of paperwork from the government for tourists, we drive out of Stone Town and north to the spice tour. The tour starts at a tree with vines climbing up it. Our guide crushes a leaf from the vine and, giving us each a piece, he asks what the vine is. The leaves smell somewhat spicy but I have no idea what spice this plant is. He shows us a string of tiny green spheres hanging from the vine, giving us each one to eat. “Pepper!” says my mother, biting into hers. I put mine into my mouth and realize that it is indeed pepper. Our guide explains how the pepper is made into different kinds, to be sold as black pepper, red pepper, green pepper or white pepper and we move on. Next he points out a tall tree with some spiky – or perhaps fuzzy – fruits growing on the large branches near the trunk. Our guide explains that this is jackfruit, which tastes like a mix between pineapple and ripe banana, while another man leaps up and begins climbing the tree. Apparently the fruit isn’t ripe, so we move on.
Next, vanilla. Another vine climbing up a tree in an interesting zigzag, the familiar dark brown vanilla beans hanging from a low part of the vine. We smell one and continue. Growing out of the ground are what could be palm leaves with very thin individual blades. “Lemongrass?” my mom ventures a guess. But no, it is ginger. Our guide cuts a piece of one of the roots and we taste it. Then we see cardamom growing at the base of one leafy plant and taste a piece of cinnamon bark. Taking his knife, our guide finds a root of the cinnamon tree and gives it to us to smell. As he had claimed, it smells just like Vick’s. He explains the medicinal qualities of the root and, showing us a bright yellow slice of the next root, does the same for turmeric.
The next spice is again cardamom, this time on the leaves of the plant, then curry leaves (pictured with my ma). We continue, seeing henna, cloves, lemongrass and pineapples. He shows us a small plant on the ground that shrinks from the touch but is good for nothing else. The man who had climbed the jackfruit tree climbs up a tall African coconut palm with a rope wound around his feet.
“Looks like it’s going to rain,” my mom commented. “Do you think it will rain?” she asked the guide.
“Oh, no,” he says emphatically.
We sit on a small bench, drinking some “tea masala” – a tea made with some of the spices we saw growing here today – and eating the coconut meat from a coconut that we just watched our tree climber open for us, letting us to drink the milk, which is better than I had remembered from the last time I tried it. It begins to rain very suddenly, an intense downpour that stops as quickly as it began.
Leaving, we are led past a table where they are selling the spices. We look at it all and my mom buys a small bag of pilau spices to add to rice. Paying the various people for the tour, we leave and head for the beach. Our guide was adamant that we see the beaches in the far north so we negotiate the price for the drive and decide to head up north rather than a beach nearer to Stone Town. (“The beach near Stone Town isn’t that nice,” my mom confided)
Our driver, Solomon, turns the van around and we begin driving north. As we drive, we are stopped a few times at police posts that block off half the road. Sometimes they ask to see the paper we had picked up in Stone Town and sometimes they simply wave us past. We drive up through the tropical landscape, through densely forested areas then out into the open. As we approached the north end of the island, Keep it Together in my ears, the plants were shorter, cultivated land interspersed in the wild growth. We leave the road and drive down a narrow and extremely bumpy dirt road through a small town until we arrive at a resort beach. The weather still does not look great: it has just rained and threatens to rain again. My mother and I wander down the beach, declining offers to go snorkeling or to have a tour of a neighboring island. We reach the end of the short beach and continue through a resort. We stop and lean on a fence on the edge of a 20-foot drop to the ocean and just admire at it, the turquoise waves hitting the rock below us. It isn’t sunny but it isn’t cold and a pleasant ocean breeze blows. Heading back, we stop at a restaurant on the beach to eat lunch.
While we eat, the wind blows to the north, taking the clouds with it and when we finish, we are treated with a sunny stretch of sky. The beach begins to fill up with the other visitors from all over Europe: the Italians seem especially well represented. I lie down on the beach and relax in the sun. The water is not very warm and I can see that we won’t have sun for long, and, not having a towel with which to dry off, I don’t dare go swimming because I would never dry off before the taxi ride back to Stone Town. We relax on the beach for the next hour and a half, through another cloudy stretch and again into the sun.
The drive back is uneventful. I sit watching the scenery pass and listen to music. Three times Solomon stops: once to check the price of some coconuts (too expensive), the second time to buy some and the third time he buys some fruits to make juice. The fruits grow in a bunch and look somewhat like oranges. He rips one open for us, revealing a harder peel than that of an orange and many seeds inside covered with a little fruit. It tastes extremely sour and Solomon tells us that it is called bungo.
We check into our hotel in Stone Town and then, asking Solomon where to find the spice market, we enter the maze-like streets of Stone Town. At first, the alleyways of Stone Town are utterly confusing and all of them seem to look identical. Not knowing the layout of the town or even where we had been to begin with, I could easily have gotten lost. Since my mother had warned me of the way that the alleys of Stone Town make it easy to lose one’s way, I was attentive and could easily find my way back after we found our way to the market and bought some Saffron and tea masala spices.
The next day, after breakfast at the hotel with what we decided may have been bungo juice, we head out to find our way through Stone Town. At first, we do not have any idea where we are or where we are going but, finding our way to a large street, we find where we are on the map and realize that we are not on the right side of town. Backtracking, we head up a road that we had come down and expect, as the map seemed to suggest, that the road would continue or connect to other large roads to take us to the ocean. In reality, the street ended in the maze of alleyways. We start out just randomly choosing what direction to travel but soon realize that since the sun was behind us, we simply had to continue the way we were going, taking the north and west alleys. Then we were suddenly out of the maze, gazing at the old fort, its tall walls and threatening towers blocking the view of the sea.
My mom and I went into the House of Wonder, a museum that, it turned out, my mother had already seen. It was all about the history of Zanzibar, which was interesting, but the tour was a bit too long for me. We then spent that day hanging out in the newly re-done park next to the ocean and wandering Stone Town. The town, despite the initial appearance of impenetrability, is actually quite small and we walk virtually all the way around it. Navigating the alleys is simple if the sun is out or with have a compass and even if we went the wrong way, we would soon get to either the ocean or Creek road, the town’s boundary on the East. I would love to spend more time in Stone town if only to explore its many alleys. For now though, we head back to the ferry and to Dar.

Susan's

On Saturday, the friend with whom we had hoped to stay upon arriving initially in Dar had returned from Musoma, so we checked out of our hotel and stuffed our bags into a taxi (Toyota Carolla, as most cabs are. Very different looking than the US version even besides the fact that the steering wheel is on the wrong side – I’ve gotten used to the cars driving on the wrong side for the most part by now). The cab ride was short: down Samora, a street that I have come to know well having walked down it at least twice a day since arriving here, left on Ohio, another main street in Dar, and down an extremely bumpy driveway to an enclosed space, quiet due to the buildings between it and the street, which contained a number of four-story apartment buildings. We pay the cab driver and begin the fun part. Susan’s apartment is on the top floor of one of these buildings, so by the time we’ve finished lugging our bags up the stairs we’re sweaty and thoroughly uncomfortable.
Susan isn’t there but she’s left us a key so we let ourselves in and relax. Later, when she has returned, we go to dinner at the Badminton Institute, which also has a good Indian restaurant, in the Indian part of Dar. She is funny and interesting and I like her immediately. She’s German but has been working in Dar for the past three years as a lawyer. Earlier that day, we had hired a taxi driver, Rogers, to take us to buy bus tickets and tickets for the ferry to Zanzibar. He coincidentally knew Susan and he told us that she spoke but a little Swahili. Watching her interact with people, though, it seemed to me that she knew plenty to be able to communicate whatever she needed to say even if I could tell that her accent wasn’t perfect.
We have one day of rest before we go to Zanzibar on Monday. We spend part of the day Sunday trying to find a hotel but all the internet cafes are closed on Sunday and the power is out so it wouldn’t work very well at any rate. By the time the power comes back on we have reservations at the Malindi guest house in Stone Town, Zanzibar that we get with many phone calls – most of the hotels are full – and a German guide book that we can’t understand. Susan and her German friend Babette, who is living and working in Mwanza, return from their facial, we all hang out and then have dinner. Just a relaxing day on the bed-like couches before our traveling begins again.
I have not had internet for the past few days so I am catching up one event at a time.

Dar es Salaam

Dar es Salaam: largest city in Tanzania, located on the Indian Ocean, used to be the capital of Tanzania but is no longer. It is definitely not a Unitedstatesian city and its valuable to describe it from a couple of perspectives.
(as compared to the US) Coming from the United States, Dar seems small, disorganized and somewhat dirty. It lacks sidewalks in many places and where there are sidewalks, they are often filled with little stands selling watches, shoes, or cell phones. Stoplights are quite rare on all but the largest streets.
(as compared to Musoma) Having experienced a smaller town here in Tanzania, I already have another point of reference from which to look at Dar. Although it initially seems so different from the United States, Dar is very westernized compared to a place like Musoma. It is obvious much of Dar has been influenced by Europe or the United States. Coming from the United States, this is hard to see sometimes with all of the differences distracting from the similarities. The picture (which seems to not be working) is from the hotel room window. The hotel, however, is very nice, if small.
I suppose that this is a sort of middle ground between the United States and rural Africa, but I think that I prefer Musoma to Dar. Musoma is even less like the United States, but there is a crazy disorganized air here in Dar that doesn’t exist in Musoma. It is actually more organized than Musoma in reality, but all of the people just make it seem very wild. I am also not all that familiar with the city so that only adds to the perceived craziness.
So far, I have done little but walk around on errands or for food, so it hasn't been all that exciting. Over the next few days it is likely to improve, however. Get ready for the goat races (what? apparently the largest event all year in Dar), a night out on the town and perhaps even a trip to Zanzibar (better get there before Ramadan).

Arriving in Dar

The flight from Dubai was nicely uneventful. It wasn't until we got off the plane that the differences became evident. The airport in Tanzania’s biggest city is nowhere near as organized as Dubai’s. Rather than a thermal imaging camera like the one we walked past in Dubai to scan for swine flu, we crowd around to complete a short questionnaire on any available flat surface and an official gives it a cursory glance before waving us through. I’m honestly not quite sure what they hope to accomplish with this.
Having made it through the baggage claim and customs, we step outside. I suggest that we go to the kiosk for the mobile phone company Vodacom to purchase a SIM card for my phone, which is conveniently unlocked. Mostly, we would need a phone to contact the friend at whose house we were hoping to stay in Dar, but this is where the problems began.
After trying every one of the numbers we have for Susan, my mom’s friend in Dar, we decided to call Robi in Musoma. As it turns out, Susan is in Musoma right now and since my mom has not gotten a reply from her recently, we aren’t sure whether she may have left a key for us. By the time we come to this conclusion, it’s too late to go check and we tell the cab driver, who had been taking us to Susan’s office, to take us instead to the hotel we’ve stayed in before, Q Bar.
We hadn’t made a reservation since we thought that we would have a place to stay so of course they had no more rooms left. My mother asks the cab driver where we could stay that isn’t too expensive and he drives us closer to the center of Dar to a hotel that looks pretty nice and is not much more expensive than Q Bar. It turns out that there was a misunderstanding and we initially were put in a room with only one bed and the room with two costs more. Consequently, my mom (being the kind of person she is) demanded that we get the room with two beds for the original price, as that is what we had been told. I stand and wait for what seems like forever while my mother argues with the receptionist and the porter, finally dragging the manager into it and getting us into the room with two beds. Good thing we didn't have to carry out her threat of moving hotels, though: we have about a million pounds of luggage what with the gear for climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro and the equipment we always need to bring from the United states for Robi's company and her own.

And we walk to go eat dinner...

Re-opening the blog

Ok so I haven't written in this blog for almost a year. While I was in Chile I'm certain I could have had enough to write about but the thing about living someplace for so long is that it all begins to seem mundane after a while. I thought that writing about day-to-day life would become boring, so I stopped.
Now that I am heading back to Tanzania (this time for three months) I figured I would dust off the old blog and begin blogging again. At the moment I am in the Dubai airport, waiting for the second and flight in this journey which will take my mother and me to Dar es Salaam. The first leg of the voyage was a non-stop flight from SF to Dubai, a long but surprisingly bearable flight. Emirates airlines' 10 inch touch screen per person in Economy helped. I watched three movies, a couple of episodes of TV shows and listened to an album by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
Weather in Dubai is unbearably hot and muggy and I am extremely glad to NOT be staying here longer than one night.