a field trip to Chaggaland with CCS

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After two days of work this week, i.e monday and tuesday, our crew from CCS Karanga thought that we need a break from the kids, hospitals, orphenages and other places of work and they took us on a field trip to the hills of Kilimanjaro. We went on a Marangu Educational tour, which in essence meant that we drove 1st to a place in town where a local artist makes batik drawings that are just beautiful (btw on Monday, we get to try this ourselves 😊) and we had to do a little souvenir shopping, then we drove furthe into the hills, and stopped at a huge tree, a baobab tree, that is supposed to be possessed by evil spirits, and where the locals will slaugther a cow or goat as an offering to prevent the evil spirit to reach their villages.
After taking a few pics of the huge tree, we went to a lava stone quarry where local enterpreneurs are able to get rocks out of the caves, then chop them with their machetes into blocks, and then these blocks are sold to build houses, as an alternative to concret blocks or cement blocks. Amazing to watch, and makes you appreciate that we have it so much easiers. The women were carrying up to three huge rocks on their heads up a steep slope out of the quarry to a place at the top, where another guy would chop them to blocks. We were told that a group of 5 workers or so can get about 150 blocks out a day. These then sell at 300-500 shilling a block, which is approx. 30 cent. You do the math... pretty abismal.
After the visit to the quarry it was onwards to the blacksmith who showed us how he makes spears and other materials for the tourist markets and curio shops, and of course he was selling them to us as well. From the blacksmith we hiked to a more modern Chagga house , where a family greeted us, and showed us an underground cave that was used about 150 years ago to seek protection from hostile tribes. The cave was disguises above ground by a chagga hut, quite clever actually. Since we were all pretty ready for lunch at this point, we just make a short stop at the market and then headed to a campgroud a bit higher up Kilimanjaro (about 4 km from the entrance gate of the national park (2500m up) and had a picnic lunch! After a short rest in the shade, we hiked to the Ndoro Waterfalls where a few brave volunteers took the plunge and got soaked by the massive water coming down. It looked like fun... but since i am getting over a bit of a cold, i did not want to take my chances and rather enjoyed watching the others get wet!
Since the waterfall was in a gorge, we now had to hike the steep trail back up, and were glad to see our vans that took us safely back to the Home base , where our cooks surprised us with an american style BBQ dinner. Another great day in Afrika. 😊.

today it was back to normal... trying to contain 90 kids... we learned the alphabet song today.... then lunch at the home base, and a trip to Moshi town to hit the internet cafe, run a few errands, like buy paper and pensils for my students, since some don't have any 😞 get sharpeners for the pencils, since the teacher uses this huge butchers knive to sharpen the pencils, and i constantly worry that she will chop her or the kids fingers off, and then it is off to dinner in town tonight with the rest of the volunteers.. we are trying out a indian/italian restaurant hmmmm, not sure how it will be, but everything is worth trying at least once.... after dinner the plan is to go to a place where live music is played.... and then back to Karanga before 11 pm, since we have to be "home" by then.

so more on how all that turned out later

be well, cheers SL

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Comments

[Katrin]

Equipment
Steffi - After reading through the blog- me and some of our trainers said we would buy sharpeners and get them to you and your daycare- So give us name and address and we will get it done. Thanks and keep having a great time.