And the journey continues!

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Mambo marafiki wangu! (Some homework for you all…)

Ok, so apologies again for taking so long to write this, I have no doubt whatsoever that my travel blog is the highlight of your days/weeks/months and therefore that I have failed you all with my lack of reporting, I am most sorry!

So what’s been happening on this side of the ‘pond’? Let’s start with work! So strangely much of my time now seems to be filled teaching - not something I predicted I’d be doing at all but I’m actually really enjoying it! I’ve been doing sessions in 3 main secondary schools about various environmental/health issues such as Waste Management and Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Trees and the Water Cycle, Conserving the Environment and Climate Change and Human Health. It’s very strange having to teach myself half the stuff again, it’s amazing how much I’ve forgotten even since university! Wikipedia has become my best friend again….but yeah, it’s going really well and I think the kids enjoy the classes - I make them do things like pretend to be trees and raindrops which they seem to find highly amusing and I predict a nice change from the ‘copy-notes-off-the-board’ style of teaching that is common here. I’ve also designed a ‘3-session’ workshop-esque thing on Reduce, Reuse, Recycle for primary school students in which we make musical instruments from recycled instruments - I’ve been to two schools and hopefully will visit another next week. The primary school kids are great fun too, and the ‘Good Morning Teacher’ chorus you receive on entering a room never tires!

I am also still going to Dar Dar Clinic every Saturday morning and every time I go my love for the kids just grows more and more. Some of them are such characters, they really make me giggle - they’ve been trying to teach me Tanzanian songs as of recent and they all get up and start trying to teach me how to dance, it’s really amusing. And a couple of weeks back they came to the beach at the house for an afternoon which was really fun, though they managed to kill about 3 starfish - I kept trying to explain to them that starfish cannot live for long out of water but naturally my Swahili vocabulary didn’t successfully stretch that far and apparently my exaggerated gestilculations were not clear enough! Alas, maybe I should do a lesson on starfish conservation in the near future!

Apart from that, things are going to get a bit busy in the next couple of weeks because on September 21st it is Peace Day which Jane Goodall loves and so Roots and Shoots celebrate it in quite a big way. We’ve joined up with a few other organisations and I just got told on Friday that I will be in change of making 3 giant peace dove we will be parading through the streets. So I’ve got to go round hotels/shops etc pleading for old sheets/paint/broomsticks etc they don’t need anymore, could be amusing!! All will be revealed in the photos…. Also, I've got to find food and chai for 60 kids before saturday with a budget of £0 - wish me luck! And I’m sure there will be loads more to get involved with too, should be a laugh.

Right, onto general life..again I’ll pick out a few highlights since explaining my whole month would just be tedious! So, I was invited to two wedding after-parties in August; African weddings, it so happens, can only be described as cheesy and thus crazily fun. Think copious alcohol, think hundreds of people, think people mining English love ballads and think weddings cakes dressed in fairy lights escorted by small waving children wearing angel wings. Oh yes..! In the last couple of months I have also discovered the joys of Kariakoo - the main ‘market’ in Dar Es Salaam. I’d avoided it before because it is renowned for being unsafe, and as a white person you can get hassled somewhat, but it is still so much fun and the atmosphere is amazing - you can literally buy anything under the sun from clothes, to food, to stationary to a TV ariel! And I’ve found this nice little local café that sells amazing chai with lots of sugar and cinnamon and ginger it in for the equivalent of around 5p a cup! And also a little shop that sells amazing chocolate donuts, even by English standards - you have no idea how happy this has made me. Also, Megan and I have discovered this huge used clothes market - basically there are loads of designer clothes etc shipped in from America, a lot of which have never even been worn, and sold on for next to nothing. You have to rummage through huge piles, but if you find a good pile it is so satisfying - I found an Abercrombie T-shirt just for slobbing about the house in for 200 Tsh - just 10p, crazy! It is worryingly easy to get carried away… but if anyone has any requests mail them over and I’ll have a rummage for you!

Hmm, what else…well one of my students called Dickson who helps me out at Dar Dar clinic invited me to his house for lunch one Sunday, which turned out to be a really lovely day. He actually lives at the other end of Dar to me in an area literally called ‘Banana’ so it took me around 2 hours on the daladalas to get there, Dar is so huge, but when I got there it felt like a little village - not like the bustling city like where I live. And his family were so welcoming and naturally fed me more local food than a family of 4 in England would eat, I was fit to burst! Then we went to watch this local youth acting group which Dickson belongs to - they were doing some role plays about HIV etc and honestly they were amazing - they were all able to cry on demand, they nearly set me off they were so convincing!

I’ve made two trips outside of Dar since my last entry - firstly I went to Bagamoyo for weekend which is a historic town just outside of Dar. It was a really cute little town with loads of German building etc left over from before the British Rule. I found this cute little guest house too to stay in which was really cheap and cheerful and just spend my couple of days walking around the town and onto the beach and I also walked the 5km and back to some Arabic 12th century grave ruins which were pretty impressive. I also witnessed some guys heaving a heard of cows onto a boat to take they over to Zanzibar. This involved shoving a long stick between the cows’ legs one at a time and pretty much catapulting them head-over-heels from the sea into the boat, was so hilarious to watch!

Apart from that, last week I made another trip up to Moshi in the foothills of Mt Kilimanjaro to visit Sam again with Megan. Had a really nice break, Moshi really is beautiful, if somewhat cold at the moment - I swear I’m going to die when I get back to England, a slight breeze and I’ve got my jumper out here! We had this one crazy day where we wanted to visit Lake Chala which is actually ¾ Tanzanian and ¼ Kenyan. We were told if we got a certain daladala to a village called Hollili we’d be able to find a means of getting the further 38miles to the lake. So we got to Hollili and literally got surrounded by locals wanting to take us - they were actually really friendly and funny though as opposed to harassing. In the end we literally rented out a daladala and about 15 villagers ended up hitching a ride with us - was such a fun day! The walk down to the lake was insane though, Megan and I couldn’t walk for 2 days due to the pain in our thighs, I’m so unfit right now! And getting back up again involved a lot of the locals quite literally shoving us from behind up the rock faces, was so dignified as you can imagine! Unfortunately we didn’t see any elephants which we were told would be a possibility, but we did see a whirlwind in the distance throwing red dust up into the air which was somewhat impressive.

Unfortunately the day we arrived there was a bit of an uproar in the village Mweka, about 40km up the mountain from Moshi where Roots and Shoots own a conservation site. Turns out two locals had gone into the Kilimanjaro National Park to collect firewood, but not from the designated ‘half mile stip’ from which they were allowed to and the guards had found them and shot them outright - one man was lucky and has survived but the other died on the spot and he was a father of 4. We were all pretty upset about it since taking a small amount of wood in order to survive should not be reason to lose your life. Anyhow, the guards involved have been imprisoned but it was a strange experience, the kind you always hear about but that you never actually experience outright so close to home usually.

Right, no blog from me would be complete without an update of what stupid things I’ve done or what I’ve lost/broken/had stolen now would it? So, in the last week of July I woke up one morning with the sensation that I’d just swallowed a load of bleach again. Naturally I put this down to my Doxycycline and thought that after a day of pain I’d be fine again, like had been the case before. But alas, a week later I still couldn’t even swallow without being in incredible pain so I decided it was perhaps time to go to the doctors - turns out that if you take Doxy and then lie down without half an hour the acid refluxes back up your throat from your stomach and effectively erodes your oesophagus! So it was a good thing I went and got some medicine for that I think! Crazy though, the 5 minute consultation and prescription knocked me back $60! Really makes you want to go to the doctors doesn’t it….

Right..things getting stolen…so my camera went missing from the house as did Megan’s external harddrive. The thing that is really annoying is we know it must have been someone who has a key to the house because there was no sign of forced entry, but that could be any number of workers etc who have a key and obviously we don’t want to go accusing people so there really isn’t anything we can do! Could be worse I suppose, I didn’t lose any money but camera number 3…getting a bit peeved with this now!

Furthermore last week I had a wee scary mugging experience - was broad daylight but no-one else was around where I was. I’m fine now, if a little edgy still, but I’m a phone down AGAIN. So what is my total now? In all honestly I can think of 5 phones I’ve lost in the last 2 years…! Then in Moshi I managed to pretty much wreck Sam’s bike beyond repair within 10 metres of leaving the house - the same bike he rode around Mt Kili for 4 days without any problems whatsoever - I literally have no idea how! I think even people here are starting to believe I am genuinely cursed now - how am I so ridiculous?!

And I think that pretty much sums everything up! In terms of what is happening in the near future besides Peace Day - I’m probably heading back to Moshi on September 26th to help Sam with his Peace Day stuff up there and the plan is to sleep under the stars up at the site, which would be amazing but it is actually extremely cold up their at night time so we’ll see! And then Eid should be at some point around September 20th, which will hopefully mean parties! It will also mean my favourite restaurant which is Muslim owned AND the nightclubs will re-open again, yay! It is actually quite strange being somewhere where a religious festival like Ramadan has such a presence.

Really hope you are all well and for those of you who have asked me the English and Tanzania postal systems indeed appear to like each other now providing we use postcodes/POBOX, so again my address is

99 Bagamoyo Road,
Mikocheni A,
Dar Es Salaam,
Tanzania,
POBOX 727

for those whom it interests! I shall leave you with my blond comment of the month…so Megan and I were collecting seeds from the site in Mweka to bring back to Dar to start a tree nursery here and we were told that Mango trees grow particularly well in Dar but that obviously the seeds are a bit large to transport. So I express my surprise at discovering mango seeds were so big at which point Sam asks me what I thought that huge stone in the middle of a mango was?!…

Love to all and hope to hear from you soon,

Carly/Carlish/Woo/Kalikiti/Danger Rice (don’t ask!)

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