Blogs from Africa - page 2697

To my last reviewer-- I checked out your blog but I don't understand French-- is there any English page I could read? or Russian? or even maybe Spanish? To anyone who doesn't know-- apparently you can subscribe to this to get emails when I update. Also, hi to Mom and Poppy-- love you! Today I had my first lessons in Wolof. I can now have the most basic of conversations in Wolof. I shall share this knowledge at the end of the post. We also had our homestay orientation today. Tomorrow I will be moving in with the family. Senegalese family relationships are really the most important part of Senegalese life. If this is what 'tribalism' constitutes, we in the west may wish to regress. Basically, in the words of a Wolof proverb: 'Nit, nitay garabam'-- ... read more

Bon Jour, We are still here in Djibouti, and decided to have another tour around town (short tour). We are including pictures of some of the tour highlights. A bit of shopping was done at what passes as the local shopping mall (pictures included). Shopping is always an experience here, since we soon find that we are a very popular couple. It must be our outstanding personalities and appearance. The local vendors always swamp us, when we stroll around the shopping area. They all believe that they know exactly what we want, and that we should purchase it from them, at their favorable quoted price. An example of this concerns a decorative dish that we purchased. The price was originally quoted at 8,000 Djibouti Francs ($45.20). After about 5 minutes of haggling, we purchased it for ... read more

Camels, Sand and Pyramids make good Egyptian coffee What possibly could be written about Cairo and the pyramids that hasn't already been written? Besided the nightmare of getting here (my flight was cancelled the last minute from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to Cairo) I more or less expected what I have experienced. Uh...besides the street children, trinket hawkers, smell of camel dung, expensive taxis from the airport and Pizza Hut. Travis and I once again embarked on another adventure that took us to Egypt. We had done little, if any, real planning other than our flights, so when we arrived (he 8 hours ahead of me) we wanted to take in as much as we could in the few days we will be here. After checking into the Sheraton Royal Gardens (4 stars and worth both the ... read more

taking the children to the beach tomorrow. i did a bit of running around getting water and juice from the places where you can buy 100 waters and 50 juices. this beach trip is a gift from the volunteers, costing us about 15,000 each (though probably less) and the children really like it. we pay for the transport (35,000), food, and for a few toys to use at the beach. it should be a good day. henning, the german volunteer, took the children there on christmas eve and said they really like it. meatte one of the danish girls just got back from zanzibar and had a great time. i'm thinking about getting in touch with usaid and other development agencies and seeing whats going on in development and with tanzania. i was teaching two past ... read more

So yesterday was definetly a busy and adventurous day. The morning I just ran a few errands, one of which was making reservations at a hotel for when my parents come! =) Only 11 more days.. can't wait! A little after 11 I went to the post office and grabbed a Matatu to the ferry. I was going to Shika Adabu (on mainland Mombasa) where Lia was staying to go to a wedding yesterday and today. The matatu ride was only about 10-15 min. Getting on the ferry was really easy, but I felt kind of awkward. I was the only white and got lots and lots of stares. I also heard "Ona, Mzungu!" "look, a white!" quite a bit. Lia met me on the other side and after buying some water we grabbed a Matatu ... read more

Hi everyone! I'm here in Dakar. I'm also using a French keyboard, so this will probably be shorter and have some errors, mostly punctuation I hope, since I am not finding it too difficult-- mostly As and Ms. :-) This is quite the experience. We went to where we're having classes and then took a walk around the area in small groups with young women who are university students. It was good, although the strong sun tired me out. The people are very warm and colorful. Some little kids have come up to say hello to the foreigners, including an absolutely adorable little girl who without a word came up to me and we shook hands (which is important in introductions in Senegal). Next she went to the boys, but they were too tall to notice ... read more

We had a great time in SA with friends and family from 5 March until 19 April. In that time we did a visit to Kruger, unforunately there had been a lot of rain before we got there so there was no need for the animals to go to the watering holes to drink, that combined with the length of the grass and the fact that a lot of the roads were closed due to flooding (although our rental car managed to get through a few of these!) made game viewing hard work. Still we saw some great stuff and it was great to be camping in the bush. We spent some time in the Drakensberg too, we camped at Royal Natal and did a day trip up to Cathedral Peak both were awesome. We also ... read more