Hi everyone, First I have to say, I have the best field assistant on Earth. I am just so happy to have such a trustworthy, hard working guy looking after things out here! I am back in the field and have a little portable modem with me this time, so I can access the internet (if briefly), which is very exciting and luxurious! I’ve spent the morning meeting with field assistants who are supervised by the superstar mentioned above, each of whom collects data on elephant raids in their own village.. it seems people are having even more problems this year, [View Full Entry]

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Ahhh, this country. It feels like so many things have happened since I last posted, I don’t know where to start! Lots of ups and downs… I’ll start with what’s freshest in my mind at the moment, and which I will warn you is very sad- at least it was for me. On the way back from the field 2 days ago we stopped by a village where a field assistant I worked with last year lives (one fun piece of news- she named her daughter’s middle name after me!!! I am feeling very honored and excited about this). The man [View Full Entry]

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Day 13 - Dar Es Saleem - 11/8/09 We left at 0900 again and only 1 minibus turned up. With number swelling due to people arriving here early needing to be picked up as well there were too many of us for the one minibus. A second one arrived and it was pure luxury; blacked out windows, curtains with uber comfortable spacious seats. We had an hour to kill in Stone Town, which I used to get some cash, post one last postcard and use the internet. The ferry seemed to be less chaotic then the way over though this time [View Full Entry]

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so im already back in town. its only saturday. i couldnt stand to be in the village for any longer. and when i was headed back on monday it felt so right. so natural. i was happy. i wanted to make sure to document that in a journal entry. that did not last long. so like i said i headed back monday. and people were excited to see me. one guy told me he thought i went back to america. good. it was nice to see people again. nice to be home. the first burn (not that bad actually) was that [View Full Entry]

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Dear Far Away Faithful Readers, We have just completed a 2 week training seminar and are ready to write grants and tackle some of the issues that the village survey pointed out as being of importance to their health and well-being. We have lots of work ahead of us. It was also a time to relax and renew acquaintances with 1/2 of our group. Everyone is still energized and ready to push their sleeves up and get to work. We also had a mini-vacation from chores as the training facility did the cooking, washed the dishes, did the laundry, emptied the [View Full Entry]

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After a leisurely breakfast we got ready to drive back. So it was going to be the two-hour track again to the main road. But on the way down, we hadn’t noticed there was a turn on the way (Many parts of Tanzania are so sparsely populated that there is only one little dirt track for hours and nothing else, no crossings, nothing). Well, so went straight without noticing, as it was in the middle of a village and no signs in this direction. But when the track became more and more overgrown, we thought this can’t be right. We could [View Full Entry]

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With the usual 24-hour entry rule we planned for a game drive in the early morning and a second one in the late afternoon. With the camp only 10min from the gate, we didn’t have far to go to get started. But our joyful mood was dented, when we bumped into Katie and Kenny, who were scanning the forest with other people for dead animals - it turned out the monkeys we saw the previous evening weren’t drunk, they had been poisoned! We offered to help them search, but Katie assured us, they had enough people, so we were not needed. [View Full Entry]

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Another Bank Holiday weekend - so we couldn’t really stay in Dar! This time the decision fell on Selous Game Reserve, the biggest game reserve in Africa. It’s about the size of Switzerland! But only the North-Eastern part is open for photo safaris, the South is for game hunting with rich Arabs and Westerners going there. We - that were my housemates Ellen and Sara, Rita and myself - chose Selous for it’s vicinity to Dar, it’s only 250km to the South. The first part is tarmac and even less frequented than the roads to the West and North from Dar, [View Full Entry]

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It is hard to believe that our stay in Dodoma and Tanzania has come to an end. Our time here, almost a year and a half, has never dragged. I do not think there has been a moment when we have wished time to move on a little quicker. In fact, mostly it has felt like time was rolling along at an accelerated pace. Be that as it may, we have now come to the point of saying our good-byes and returning home. December has been a time of bringing the school term to a close with mid-year exams, a Christmas [View Full Entry]

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Sitting over lunch with her teaching assistants at the Early Years Centre, Gerry became curious about the food they were bringing to eat. There were some very typical Tanzanian foods that one sees a lot - rice with beans, pillau, mendazi, chapati, fruit… But Gerry’s attention was caught by the bread that Pendo, one of the members of her staff, brought to school - lovely, fresh, golden brown, white bread. Pendo told Gerry that she made her own bread. She baked it on her jiko, Swahili for stove. Jikos come in a number of forms. Pendo’s jiko is a deep pan [View Full Entry]

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