Sometimes this place is ridiculous. I mean, really. On the way home from work the other day I got a lift from a guy on his way into town (a lot of times my coworkers and I will get “lifties” from the village area out to the highway where we can get a dala-dala). Anyways, there was a serious problem with his automobile. He said he had gone to Arusha earlier and it took him four hours (it’s supposed to take one hour and a half). I’m not sure how he got the damn thing there and back and was still alive to tell me about it, but somehow it happened. People die on that road all the time in functioning vehicles. Anyways, every 10 meters or so he would have to go in reverse because the car would start to veer off to the left and head for the ditch or farm on the side of the road. It was kind of like getting one of those irritatingly dysfunctional shopping carts with the one bad wheel that makes you have to redesign your whole steering technique. Except this was a car. So while he was driving down the road he’d have to physically use his weight to push the steering wheel all the way to the right to keep the car going straight, or end up reversing to straighten out. To actually make a turn (which I was silently panicking about in my mind before it happened) he’d have to reverse a whole hell of a lot to pull it off so that the car’s orientation was all set up. Yes. Ridiculous.
Anyways, I digress. Here’s what’s been going on recently:
*A few weeks ago I met my friend Sarah (who works for Visions) in a small mountain town called Lushoto. It’s close to four hours east of Moshi, edging toward the coast. The Usambara Mountains surround Lushoto and are often referred to as “the Alps of Tanzania.” I don’t know about being comparable to the Alps, but they are really beautiful, and strangely enough, waking up at our lodge hidden away from town further back into the mountains I felt like I was in Europe somewhere like the Basque country in Spain. I met Sarah on a Friday and took the bus from Moshi (by myself!) to Mombo, where I caught a ride with a medic driving up into the mountains. Lushoto is fairly small with some old German buildings including a church leftover from the colonial period. It was definitely a nice break. Sarah and I stayed at Muller’s Lodge and spent our down-time reading old magazines in our long underwear. There was a fireplace and delicious soup and heavy comforters. We spent most of the weekend hiking with our guide Babu Francis. He’s seventy-four years old and still witty and spry/incredibly fast despite the fact that he is a smoking fiend and skinny as a stick. Babu knows all these random facts like who has assassinated who in U.S. history and he grew up in Tanzania when it was still a colony so his English is excellent. I loved the way he would eat a little plate of cookies and drink a cup of coffee back at the lodge smiling like he was so content with life. He knew all the names of the plants out in the jungle and their medicinal properties (malaria, nausea, stomach pain, etc), which was so interesting to hear about.
Together with an older man named Richard from the UK who works in the Selous, a national park in the south, we hiked and rock climbed up a crack to the top of Kivulga Point and reached Irente view point which overlooks the whole valley surrounding the Usambaras. It felt like we were up in the clouds and it made me think of friends I’ve known who’ve climbed Kili and hike above the clouds on only their second day out. The villagers were all shouting greetings at us, which made me feel like a spectacle, but my favorite villager by far was the man sitting outside his house with a tea cozy on his head. It was a perfect hat (the tea cozy was of an English country house) and it reminded me of an E.E. Cummings poem. One of the last places we went was Irente Farm which makes fresh cheese, jam, yogurt and granola and is tucked away in a mountain valley. Babu, of course, was pretty pleasantly pleased with the picnic lunch.
*On Wednesday night I went to a local outdoor bar called Glacier (again with Sarah) to watch the final game of the European cup. People here are so into European soccer/football that when FC Barcelona made their goals people would scream and dance up and down and say happy things in Swahili. I’m really glad Manchester United didn’t win as Ronaldo is a big creep (the waxing and the fake tan don’t help). He’s also a real ball hog and takes a lot of cheap shots. Ok, enough.
*I turned twenty-four last week and went out for Indian food with people from Visions and Amani. It turned out nice even though the power was out most of the time so we ate by lantern light. I was given a khanga (large African fabric with a Swahili proverb on it) and a batik purse, which were thoughtful. During the day the kids gave me a card after stampeding the art/play room singing “Happy Birthday” which another volunteer Laura arranged. It was really sweet but at first I had no idea why they were all running in there and felt like the captain of a ship facing mutiny. Most of the letters they gave me basically said happy birthday and please teach me this and that, thanks.
*Work was great last week. The kids had been driving me crazy but on Friday their craziness was actually pretty entertaining and somewhat productive. The kids once again did not have class (I’ll talk about the ridiculousness of this later) and it was a beautiful day- the sun was shining with a cool breeze, Kili had finally come out after four days or so in the clouds, etc etc. Anyways they kept asking me if they could watch a movie (psh!) and instead I brought out…the slip-n-slide! Yesss. Kudos to the donor who sent that handy contraption over this way; it is hilarious to see the kids’ sheer joy on sliding face first down that piece of plastic not to mention pretty constructive when soap is added. (Some of the kids smell real bad).
This Friday is not as exciting. This is because the last Friday of every month everyone at Amani cleans the entire compound. The kids like to wear the mops on their heads and say they’re Bob Marley haha. Last time I got the girls’ bathroom downstairs (yay…); this time I have the boys’ bathroom upstairs, which is bad enough, with the added company of some of the worst behaved kids. For instance: the teenager who orchestrated the robbing of 500,000 shillings (a little less than $500) from Amani’s storekeeper. Yea, he’s been to jail and he also wrote a rap song about me. This should be awesome.
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