Something that was quite strange for me to get used to, was the new daily rhythm. Not traditionally a morning person, I got surprisingly quick adapted to the early start and wake up naturally at sunrise (shortly past 6am). But I found it very hard to get used to the combination of hot weather and short evenings. In my mind hot weather means nice long evenings and not pitch black night before the clock strikes 7 in the evening! This is somewhat limiting, as some areas become a bit dangerous at night and life in general doesn’t quite stop (at least [View Full Entry]

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Okay, I’m cheating a little bit here, as I’m typing this up with a ‘slight’ delay, but at least now I know the organisation and can explain everything a bit better… Femina HIP is multimedia initiative, which started off 10 years ago with a magazine, called ‘Femina’. Originally a commercial glossy women’s magazine, it was repositioned as a vehicle to educate young Tanzanians about sexual reproductive health and many other aspects of life. It is now the biggest magazine in the country and distributed in some 160,000 copies all across Tanzania to [View Full Entry]

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Naomi filled me in that Molly, who’s working as a consultant at our organisation, Femina HIP, was living upstairs in our building and would give us a lift to the office! It was already baking hot again at 7.30am, so I was rather pleased to be taken in Molly’s air-conditioned RAV4, then having to cramp into an overloaded Dala-dala. We took some back streets with some serious potholes to avoid the traffic jam as much as possible, so got to the office in little more than half an hour. Molly, who was from the US, works in fact as a HR [View Full Entry]

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After the journey there I really wasn’t looking forward to the bus trip back to Dar, fearing for my life and preparing for another endless wait at the bridge building site. But after a World Rally Championship style drive through Morogoro’s backstreets with chickens and children jumping out of the way our bus driver calmed down and it was a rather uneventful journey. The bridge was finished (after years of builing work!), so we reached Dar by lunchtime. Sandra and I didn’t even get to eat our bread and cheeses that we bought for the long journey…). VSO originally want [View Full Entry]

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The second week of the training got more tedious and our group fragmented more and more. We all just wanted to get to our destination, know where we would be living, what our placements would be like and so on… The food was getting more unbearable too, well it remained the same twice a day, every day. So with the combination of stodgy high carb food and getting on each others nerves, we went out for dinner in town with our small group of young vols a few more times to keep our sanity! Naomi, the Kenyan girl, who was going [View Full Entry]

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Sunday was our day off from the language training and we were offered to go on a safari to the nearby National Park Mikumi. About 2/3 of our group signed up for this and we were supposed to leave Morogoro at 4am to reach the park gates for opening - wildlife watching is best at dusk and dawn, then more animals are out in the open than in the midday heat. I say supposed to, as everyone was there ready to go apart from Mama J, one of the language teachers, who was supposed to come with us and the bus… [View Full Entry]

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Yesterday we learned some more vocabulary for the kitchen by studying recipes for typical Tanzanian dishes. It felt a bit like watching a cookery show with our teachers lined up in front holding ingredients up and naming them in Swahili… Today we ventured to another convent a little bit further outside Morogoro to actually do some Swahili cooking. The walk there was exciting enough passing through a brick making factory - house high piles of red bricks, that were covered in soil and then lit up in the middle to burn them. The cooking was then took place outside - Tanzanians [View Full Entry]

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Well, this is not quite true, Tanzanians use the same clocks and watches, they only read them differently - the opposite way to be precise: The day starts at 6AM (with sun rise) and ends at 6PM (with sunset). This means 12 is 6 and 3 is 9 and so on… On first impression this is kind of annoying, but it does make sense, as life really moves with the daylight (especially with the limited availability of artificial light). We were warned to double-check, which time people are using! The tricky part is, that some Tanzanians might use ‘English time’, when [View Full Entry]

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Not having had a chance to visit this new customs agent and not having them recommended properly either (after all Bhupesh, my shipping agent said, he hadn’t dealt with them either), I felt a little tense. But it was kind of promising that Roselyn from Malai took the initiative and called me in response to my email on Monday. We agreed I fax her all documents and then she’ll get back to me with. So I walked into town to find an internet café with fax service to send her my pile of papers. Today she called me again and said [View Full Entry]

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After forcing myself to get the vocabulary we had been taught during the day the previous evening I felt a little less lost at the beginning of the morning lessons. But nevertheless we continued to race through basic Swahili in record speed, ‘to have’ and ‘to be’ including negative versions in the morning interrupted by some Cornish pasty style things stuffed with mince - I resorted to some fresh mangos from the market in stead. Then groundhog day lunch: same food, same music - we had to endure the same tape of a church choir at full blast for every meal. [View Full Entry]

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