Another month gone..

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Dear all,

Massive apologies for the lack of contact! Things have been go go go here and it is so difficult to find a couple of hours when you can actually sit down and type! Anyway, it means you’ll get a nice big fat juicy update now…I’ll try and make it reasonably entertaining to keep you alert!

So what have I been up to in the last month?! Firstly lets talk work! So at the beginning of June the schools broke up for vacation for a whole month and since my main job here is working with kids it has meant the last month has been quite quiet. I’ve been spending quite a lot of time in the office doing research etc and getting some ideas together for when the kids returned last week. The head teacher of one secondary school I’m working with called Msimbazi has asked me to do weekly presentation at the Roots and Shoots club on different environmental/human community issues. I’ve met up with her a couple of times over the holidays and together we’ve come up with a list of topics including recycling, the importance of trees, bushmeat issues, human health in and around Dar and waste management. So I’ve basically been working on these, trying to think of ways to make my sessions as interactive as possible to ensure the kids understand me (even though secondary school kids are supposed to be taught entirely in English, they rarely are so I’m a bit worried they might find me difficult to understand!). I gave my introductory talk to the club last week and they seemed really positive so I’m looking forward to teaching them. And hopefully if it goes well I want to carry out the presentations in other secondary schools too so that’ll definitely keep me busy.

Also last month, we finally managed to get some of the kids at Yatima orphanage tested for HIV - a lady called Janet who we work with at Dar Dar Clinic came with us and tested the children for free. Being a total needle phobic I was on chief sticker duty! I basically sat outside with the kids and played with them and gave them a sticker after they had had their jabs. So far we’ve tested nearly 100 kids and only 1 has been positive. It is still one too many, but a lot less than I was expecting so that is a massive relief.

Apart from that I’ve still been visiting Dar Dar Clinic every Saturday morning to do classes there with the kids - we’ve learnt about animal adaptations, drawn ‘made-up’ animals, made leaves for a tree I’m hoping to use in future lessons etc - it’s amazing how inventive the kids are here, and how artistic - I swear some of the primary school kids can draw way better than me!

Now schools are back I reckon things are going to get a bit crazy busy with visiting secondary schools and I also want to set up a project with primary schools where I can give a short talk on reduce, reuse, recycle and then do a workshop making musical instruments out of recycled materials. I currently have a huge pile of yoghurt pots/juice cartons etc in my room ready for action! So we’ll have to see how that develops…

Ok, work talk over…back to the social life! Well, this month it has been pretty crazy in the house. Pete who I was living with before has gone back to America, but his replacement Megan has moved in who is lovely. And Elsbeth a new volunteer has also arrived, but she decided to go and work in Moshi, so when everything gets settled again (hopefully by the end of this week) it will be just Megan and I in the house here in Dar until October. But we’ve also had various visitors in and out and there was a German film crew here for a while filming for a film about Jane Goodall’s life - I woke up one morning to find the crew filming off my balcony - considering I have no curtains it was slightly uncomfortable! So I’ve been sharing my room a lot - another reason why it has been hard to find enough time to myself to type!

Because the schools have been on break, I’ve used this time to do a bit of travelling. In the first week of June, I went to Morogoro for the weekend with Alex, Abdallah and Hassan who I work with here. It is a small town in central Tanzania, about 3 hours drive west of Dar. I had a really lovely weekend, the Sunday was one of my favourite days here so far. Despite having been on the Konyagi the night before and only getting 3 hours sleep, we decided it’d be a really good idea to hike the mountain. We set out about 9am and finally reached one of the ‘tops’ at around 3pm. Hiking with three boys highlighted just how appalling my fitness really is, and it was so hot, at one point the guys chucked a bottle of water over my head to stop me passing out! When we got near to the top too, I really felt like the air had got really thin, just walking quite slowly made me properly pant. However, just before we reached the top we came across this beautiful waterfall/stream-esque thing which we stopped at for an hour, it was so nice just to lay in the sun in the water and look at the view! Also gave me chance to get my breathe back so I didn’t look quite so pathetic on the final climb!

We finally got back to base at around 8pm by which time it was really dark and my legs had already started to cease up. But we returned to find some local people who Abdallah knows had cooked up amazing pilau rice with meat and salsa, I don’t think I’ve ever tasted anything so good! We all collapsed into bed around 9pm and the next day returned to Dar. It took me a good three days to be able to use my legs again..that was by far the most exercise I’ve done in the last year of my life…

The general nights out dancing/beach visits/evening drinks sessions have continued (in one of which I ended up hanging out with a friend of a friend who turned out to be one of the most famous rap artists in the whole of East Africa called FidQ- I got massively star struck but here famous people aren’t treated as a big deal at all so I had to pretend I was totally ‘down to earth’ with the whole situation!). But mid-June we also had a leaving party at the house for Pete and then on Saturday the 27th we went to a Beenie Man concert in Dar. The leaving party was so much fun, we set up tables and candles in the garden and one of our friends Erasto MC’s at weddings so he brought all his kit and did the music. About 40 people came and we all danced the night away to the Bongo Flava, was so funny dancing with all the house staff too! And the Beenie Man concert was amazing - the atmosphere was really good and there were loads of Bongo Flava artists supporting him and he was just so funny, he gave a very informative and perhaps slightly inappropriate music and dancing low down on how guys should be pleasing their women, I wish I could have filmed it! And the tickets were the equivalent of £4 - crazy!

And my final ‘big’ event of this past month was visiting Zanzibar from Monday the 29th June until Sunday 5th July for the annual Film Festival where they play loads of cultural films in the Old Fort and there is live music until around 2am every morning. I went with Alex, Abdallah and Hassan and we met Sam (volunteer from Moshi) there too with his friend Annaleis who he was doing some travelling with. We all had a wicked week, though there was a powercut in Stone Town where we were staying for 5 whole days, which kind of put a dampener on the Film Festival because a lot of stuff couldn’t happen due to the lack of power being produced by the back-up generator.

On one day, Sam, Annaleis and I managed to find a beach on the East coast of the island that was totally deserted called Uroa and was absolutely beautiful. At one point we did get surrounded by village kids who seemed totally fascinated by us which felt a little uncomfortable since we were all half naked in our swimwear…but mostly we were entirely on our own.

Another day, Sam and Annaleis rented motorbikes (I got on the back of Sam’s, far too scared to ride my own and pretty sure my insurance does not cover motorbike injuries..). I won’t lie - on leaving the town it was one of those moments when I slightly wished I’d become religious before now in hope that God might have answered my prayers - I’m pretty convinced had I fallen off the bike that my ‘helmet’ would have vacated my head long before I hit the floor and ‘driving’ in Tanzania is not the safest I’ve seen - it’s not unusual to see a bike overtaking a car overtaking a bus with oncoming traffic attempting to do something similar. Before hitting the ‘open’ roads I spent a lot of time with my eyes shut just hoping there would be something left of me to send back to England! However, once we were away from the town traffic it was amazing just biking past all the little villages and we ended up in Joanzi Forest where most of the remaining Red Colobus monkeys in the world live. It was so amazing - we came into a clearing and all the monkeys were just playing about half a metre from us - one came up to me and tapped my leg then ran off as if he wanted to play tag and another jumped on me from a tree (I decided to briefly ignore the fact I haven’t had my rabies vaccine…). The babies were so adorable - they kept diving from the trees into the clearing over and over again, much in the same way kids fly off a diving board, was so funny!

I was really lucky going with Tanzanians too because they knew a guy called Sali who lived on the island who basically drove us around for a couple of days for free. He took us to couple of more touristy beaches on the north coast which were still beautiful but very busy. We also went to a Full Moon party and we saw the tortoises - I held one and they are surprisingly heavy, and on the final day we went to a spice farm which was really interesting - I had no idea what any of the spices looked like in plant form! The tour guide made me giggle too because he kept describing the aphrodisiac spices as ‘those that make danger in the bedroom’. We tried some really tasty spice teas which I want to try and replicate, and got given gifts made out of banana leaves - I got a rather attractive hat and a frog necklace which I took great joy in wearing for the remainder of the day, despite strange looks from on comers.

In the evenings we wandered the streets of Stone Town and ate amazing food off the little stalls - I’ve now sampled lobster, various different fish, squid, octopus, you name it! We also listened to the live music at the old fort - all in all a really nice week bar the returning ferry journey which was a little more than rocky, there were loads of people chucking up and I really wasn’t that far off myself!

And that brings me to this past week. The only really eventful thing to report is the arrival of Jane Goodall. Now, despite being English herself no one in England knows who she is, but basically in the US and Australia in particular she is a big deal. To cut a long story short she is famous for her research into chimpanzees and she is the founder of JGI which Roots and Shoots is a branch of and I’m currently living in her house. The only thing is, we weren’t sure what time she was arriving last Wednesday so we all went for drinks after work and got back to the house to find Jane already there, sat in the candlelight with her son Grub because the electric had gone out. Luckily Grub had worked out where we had left the spare key, but effectively we locked Jane Goodall out of her own house…and to make matters worse we were all a bit tiddly! It was really lovely to meet her though and I only made one stupid comment which is a record (“Do you know how many flights you have taken in your life”…really Carly what were you thinking?!). She went off to do filming elsewhere in Tanzania the next day but should be returning this evening for 3 nights so hopefully I’ll get to spend a bit more time with her - thought she always seems inundated by visitors - even the night she got here she had about 20 people turn up and it was gone 10pm!

Ok, nearly finished, all that remains is to tell you about The Bad Luck of Carly This Month (or good luck depending on how you want look at it - you decide!)

1) About a month ago now an unripe, rock hard avacado fell off the tree and landed on the ground with incredible force, forming a slight crater literally a centimetre from my left foot.
2) About 3 weeks ago one of the cats in the house got under my feet and I proceeded to fall down about 8 stone stairs. I got away with just a rather bruised left elbow, bruised bum cheeks and a very stiff neck. I also suffered a bleeding tongue from biting on it to stop myself from crying!
3) Two days following the above event I was walking along the side of the road in the evening with Sam and Pete when a car came up behind me and hit my right elbow and hip. In the split second I thought perhaps I was dying I failed to notice the guy in the passenger seat rip my bag from off my shoulder through his window. Luckily the bag only contained my work mobile (which I now have to replace, grr!) and the equivalent of about £15. No passport, bank card or camera, phew! The funny thing was the guy rang Pete off my mobile which he had stolen saying he felt bad and that it was an accident. I mean, really!
4) The week I went to Zanzibar my camera decided to stop working. No, I didn’t lose it. No I didn’t break it. It just stopped. Like that. So I guess I’m going to have to return it to England and hope they’ll sort it out, but it meant I didn’t get any personal photos in Zanzibar L
5) Finally, yesterday I was sat on the toilet when the glass light fitting fell off the ceiling straight onto my head and shattered all over the floor. I escaped with only one small cut on my ankle.


I shall leave you now with my ‘blonde’ moment of the month. So I was with Megan having just picked up Elsbeth from the airport in Pete’s rented car. We were looking for Pete’s car in the car park - I made the others try and get into a particular car because I knew Pete’s was black and had a registration number beginning with T. So we couldn’t get in it…Pete rocks up - I told him my theory for thinking that this car was his car at which point he cracks up laughing at me. Turns out in my 2 months here I’ve failed to notice that literally every car in Tanzania has a registration number beginning with T…

And so for now ‘Kwaheri’ (Goodbye). Oxford clan, please get in touch about your results!! And hope you are all enjoying your summers,

Much love to all xxxxx


P.s - it has taking me about half an hour to upload one photo so you'll just have to wait in suspense for the others cos I need to leave the office now!

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Photos

Dar Es Salaam
Random road in Dar

Morogoro
The mountain we climbed

Comments

[Claire]

Wow!
Amazing Carly. Point 5 of your 'Bad luck list' made me almost wet myself in the middle of the office! :-) You're an actual legend. I mean who hurts themselves THAT much!?!?! Was lovely to talk to you the other day and glad everything is going well :-) Much love xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx