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Published: November 8th 2009
Hello people - hope everyone is well! So two months have passed again. Dar is now hot hot hot - it’s pretty unbearable even for someone who loves the heat because it is so humid. Even the 10 minute walk from the house to the office leaves me drenched - taking a shower (or rather bucket bath) almost seems a pointless activity because within 2 minutes you feel dirty again. On the plus side, having no hot water is no longer a burden - I always welcome a bucket of cold water to cover myself with at the end of the day! What is also weird about the heat too is that I keep forgetting what time of the year it is. It was really weird thinking about Halloween and bonfire night and everyone in England wrapped up. I just feel so far away from it right now!
So, what’s been happening with me this time? In my last entry I spoke about preparing for Peace Day - it did end up being a fair amount of work but was pretty fun! I had to organise the symposium on September 12th for the kids to come and learn about peace etc which went mostly smoothly apart from the taxi I was taking to collect 50 lunches from a local bar got stuck in the sand and then when I did arrive already half an hour late they’d managed to miss off half the order, so the kids ended up getting their lunch 2 hours late. In true ‘English’ style I was practically hyperventilating from stress but when I got back the Tanzanians weren’t phased at all, 2 hours late really isn’t considered much here, even for a planned event!
I spent the most part of the following week leading up to Peace Day making giant peace doves. I think my Nana would have been proud of my sewing skills. The hardest bit was trying to sew white sheets around a chicken mesh ‘head’ and then tediously painting huge yellow beaks with a paintbrush one might normally use to fill in minute details of a picture - it really must have been quite amusing to walk in on!
Peace Day itself in Dar was on September 18th and was a really fun day. Initially around 2000 Roots and Shoots kids and some kids from other organisations met in a huge field and from there we walked through the streets of Dar with our giant peace doves, singing and dancing along to the bands. It just felt really nice to be part of something so big - stopping traffic in Dar is no easy task normally! The rest of the day was filled with different evens, kids dancing, reading poems about peace etc. It felt a bit deflating when everything was over, especially after all the work that went into it, but I guess that is what events planning is like..
The next day was my birthday and I made a big chocolate cake to take with me to Dar Dar clinic for the kids and we had an English-style birthday party with pass the parcel, musical chairs, musical bumps, pin the tail on the donkey, the smartie game etc. It was actually really fun, I got to act like a bit of a kid again for the day! But there is a good reason cake in Tanzania does not have butter icing - within 5 minutes of taking the cake out of the fridge it had pretty much turned to mush, but still tasted pretty good all the same if I daresay so myself. The remaining quarter of the cake I pretty much demolished myself throughout the day and needless to say went to bed with chronic stomach ache - it was the first time I’d eaten rich food in a good few months and apparently my tolerance for lots of butter and chocolate has reduced somewhat…
The next major event was going up to help Sam with the Peace Day events in Moshi on the 26th. Thought there were less people at this event it was still really lovely - Sam had asked all the schools to make up a song and dance about the environment and this one group of primary school kids actually included ‘Kaka (brother) Sam’ in their song, it was adorable - I was quite envious!
After spending a couple of days in Moshi with Sam, we both went to Morogoro with Abdallah to do some work there for a week. It was one of my favourite weeks since I arrived here - Morogoro is beautiful, a little town set in the foothills of a mountain range and the views are lovely. There is also this one restaurant that does really amazing Tanzanian food, which always makes for a good trip. I ended up teaching in 3 primary schools about the importance of trees and doing mini workshops with them - then I was asked to be guest of honour at a tree planting event which was quite touching if a little confusing. At the end of the week Sam, Abdallah and I took a trip to this place just outside the town where they train rats to detect land mines. It was really interesting and the rats were actually really cute - didn’t look like the one’s that run around in England at all. The company (Upopo) are also currently training some rats to sniff out the TB virus in a saliva sample and apparently they are more successful at doing this than current biological testing which often brings out false positives etc. I thought this was pretty fascinating, especially considering all the other smells that must be present in a sample of saliva. Guess it just goes to show science is making things more complicated than they need to be now days…wise words of the day!
On Friday evening we decided to climb the mountain (the same one I had already climbed) and camp at the top for the night. We took a different route up which was initially really steep and I don’t know whether it was a mixture of the altitude, tiredness and general unfitness at the moment but I ended up having some sort of asthma-esque attack which really freaked me out. However, I kept going slowly slowly (never climb a mountain with just two physically fit boys… really doesn’t do wonders for the self esteem) and once we got past the steep bit the climb was really pleasant. We passed through loads of villages which were really isolated to the extend that the people had their own languages and Swahili was their second. There just seemed to be something really appealing about the lives of the people, living in their little huts up in the mountain, however I’m sure the reality is very different. They all rely on selling produce they grow in the town to make a living and one woman told us every day they would hike the 3 hours down to Morogoro town and back to sell mainly bananas and some vegetables. Based on the fact you can buy three bananas for around 5 pence here I dread to imagine what the families live on. Yet still they seem so happy and we so willing to give us food - it really did make me feel quite uncomfortable and ashamed about my own way of living in a way. I don’t know that I would be so willing to give if I really did have next to nothing.
Anyway, we wound through the villages, picked up some veg and a chicken (!) and finally got to the camping spot just before sunset. We set up camp, Abdallah killed the chicken (I couldn’t watch - though I did watch them de-feather and de-gut it and it was pretty interesting seeing all the undeveloped eggs inside etc…) and we went about cooking our dinner on an open fire. It was such a lovely evening, if a little cold, and the view of Morogoro was beautiful - I just wish I had had a good camera (or indeed a camera at all, doh!) to capture it. Next day we were going to climb a little further to a forest, but it was too foggy to see anything, so when the fog finally cleared at around midday we started our climb back down and needless to say all slept like babies for pretty much the whole of the next day!
That brings me up to 5th October and since then I’ve been in Dar. Things have been crazy busy with 4 new volunteers arriving - Sally from England first, then Keisha from the US and finally this week just gone Brett and Una from Canada. Last week Sam and his brother who came to visit were also staying in Dar so the house went from just me and Megan to 8 of us in the space of 3 weeks! It has actually been really nice having so many people around though.
As well as spending a lot of time with the new volunteers helping them to acclimatize etc, in the last month I’ve also been lucky enough to start volunteering 2 days a week at Oxfam on a Monday and Tuesday. My work is mostly office based, but has been really interesting and has included carrying out research into the media in Tanzania and arranging some interviews to help Oxfam with focusing their advocacy work here in Tanzania, editing some official documents, writing media invites to Oxfam events and doing some research into women rights for a 5-year project that is about to be launched. I also had a week where I got pretty ill and ended up having to get tested for malaria but all was fine in the end and a bout of antibiotics seemed to clear up whatever bug I’d managed to catch - you can literally get any medication over the counter here, it’s pretty insane!
I’ve also continued my teaching at secondary schools and last week managed to arrange for a couple of people from Femina - an NGO - to come and talk to some of my students about HIV and reproductive health. Despite being around 15 years of age the students were really mature and asked loads of good questions - I felt like a proud mother! One kid asked if you could catch HIV from sharing contact lenses which to begin with I thought was a pretty funny question, but actually even the Femina women didn’t really know the answer because technically they do come into contact with bodily fluids so! We just told them not to worry about that and that the chances would be next to nothing, if not actually nothing and quickly tried to change the subject before they started questioning us on the matter anymore!
I’ve also continued to go the Dar Dar clinic every week and am happy Sally seems really interested in taking over from me when I leave. In fact just this last week we took the kids to the botanic gardens (more of a park) because there are too many of them to fit into the small room we have at the clinic now and play comfortably. Anyway, the manager of the garden was really impressed with the work Elimina (the lady at the clinic overseeing the club) and the volunteers are doing for the kids and he offered the gardens as a weekly venue and even said he would clear a building for us on the grounds for when in rained. Elimina wouldn’t stop thanking me for my input in finding the gardens and even though I didn’t really do much (!) it was still really nice to be so appreciated - I’m really over the moon the kids will have somewhere nicer to play and hopefully we are going to set up some activities involving the gardeners - maybe get them to teach the kids about some of the plants or let them help with some gardening etc which will be really ‘Roots & Shoots’ so that’s really great.
Finally, I finally got round to helping the gardener Dula at Jane’s house make a compost bin in the garden so now hopefully we can generate some compost for Dula to use but also for the kids to take to their schools for if they need it since buying compost here is really expensive. On the ‘social’ side of things, I’ve been a little sad because one of my closest friends here Jones got posted to Equatorial Guinea for a job for 6 months and I’m really missing his company! However, I’ve been spending a lot more time at people’s houses which I’m loving because I love the atmosphere in Tanzanian neighbourhoods, everyone out on the streets chatting, kids playing, people eating communally etc. It is also really good for practicing my Swahili, but also makes me realise how little I know in the grand scheme of things. Anyway, apparently I’m officially Tanzanian now because I’ve been taught how to cook chapatti on a charcoal ‘kiko’ (stove - and I really did not want to know how much oil went into those things..), I’ve been given a couple of kangas (fabric women here use as skirts/aprons/wrap around their head/carry their babies in etc) as presents and also this last week I finally let Abdallah’s sister who is a hairdresser braid my hair. She has been wanting to for quite a while but I’ve been kind of trying to avoid letting her because I end up feeling like one of those white people who are trying too hard to be African! It took over 4 hours and did hurt somewhat but it is actually beautifully done and I don’t feel too stupid - most people have just told me I’m a true Tanzanian now and therefore can’t go home…
Which brings me to the main reason I really wanted to get my blog written this weekend…for those of you who don’t already know - after much debating, writing pros and cons lists, scanning my finances etc I’ve finally decided to stay in Tanzania. I delayed my flight home last week from November 15th to February 23rd. I’m hoping this will give me enough time to find some work and if I can’t at least I have enough money to keep me going until then. To cut a long story short, I decided I would benefit more from staying here right now than from going home - even if I can’t find a paid job, there are plenty of volunteer opportunities here for me and it’s much cheaper to keep myself here. Plus at the end of the day I just don’t feel ready to leave. I am pretty scared because I officially have to leave Jane’s house next week and as of yet I have no definite idea of where I will live/what I’m going to be doing etc! However, I have people I can stay with and I’m just trying to live by the saying ‘ with great risks come great gains’ at the moment - keep your fingers and toes crossed for me! And on the plus side of course it means my blogs (as infrequent as they are) will not be coming to an end quite yet!
Right, sorry this entry has not been quite as exciting - I honestly can’t think of anything particularly stupid I’ve done/said in the last two months to keep you all amused! Anyway, I shall let you all know what becomes of me..as for the near future Emily Haseler (friend from uni for those of you who don’t know) is arriving in Dar tomorrow and will be spending a week with me before she heads inland to do her medic placement - sooo excited since we’ve planed some low-key travelling for 4 days which will hopefully involve some relaxation, some sunning and some (obviously) fantastic company, all muchly appreciated right now!
So for now kwaheri - missing you all and sad I won’t be seeing you before Christmas but I think I’ve made the right decision! Please get in touch with your news too - I feel out of the loop somewhat!
Much love,
Carly xxx
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Jess Daggers
non-member comment
Carly I'm so happy you're having such a wonderful time that you want to stay out there! When I saw Emily was going out to see you (and I'm sat at my desk at home working at my computer with gloves on with a grey gloomy sky to look out at) the first thing I did was to look up flights to Tanzania! Not much point, since I'm not really earning money yet and won't be for a while, but I wanted to tell you anyway! It sounds incredible. Very much enjoying the posts, and will look forward to the next one. Much love, jxxxxxx