Sorry about the lack of blogging but the electricity in this place has been shocking the past few days. Yesterday there were four power cuts in three hours, each one lasting about 45 minutes – the joy! This would be annoying enough on the best of occasions but I was trying to teach one of my ladies how to use the internet and I was trying to check my football predictions (what with the special one leaving and all). Suffice to say my predictions are still six weeks old and I had to give her a lesson today as well.
Mind you the original plan for today was not going too well. We decided to go up to the hotel swimming pool and have a relaxing lounge around, may be a bit of a swim, bit of lunch – nice time. Hmmm…nice time lasted for about 3 seconds as we noticed about eight very loud, very splashy children in the pool and taking up all the sunbeds even though they didn’t need them AT ALL.
So we grinned and bore it and gradually appropriated sunbeds then bliss, they all sat down to eat chips and as their lovely little mouths were full of fried potato they actually shut up (these were the first fat children I have seen in Africa – it was a bit like being in West Quay shopping centre only slightly sunnier!). Hurrah! We thought, peace and quiet perhaps chance of a quick dip but no, around the corner came about 12 expat kids and three nannies. The joy!
Within moments the swimming pool looked more like a tureen of child soup and the noise levels were deafening. We were all mightily irritated.
Now do you see why my volunteer project is with adults?
It’s 35 degrees today – just a tad warm. In fact by the time I’ve done my 45 minute walk back home I will probably just be a small puddle.
Yesterday was obviously Tanzanian national be cruel to animals day as small children seemed fascinated by squashing birds, throwing birds, kicking kittens and tormenting lizards – lovely. As you can imagine the bird throwing was my least favourite thing.
Yesterday was also Moshi bad smell day. Every day I have to walk past a very large rubbish dump – it’s a joy I tell you but yesterday it surpassed itself with ickiness as the main downtown sewer burst right next to it so it was a choice between tiptoing around the sewage but having to get rather closer to the rubbish dump than I would have liked, or wading through the sewage. I chose the first option and amused many locals with my graceful leaps across puddles of goodness knows what!
Rather excitingly I have been invited to one of my ladies’ daughter’s secondary school graduation on Friday. Turns out it’s quite a big thing so I will wear my new Africa outfit (that my ladies made and is surprisingly lovely – I may even wear it at home). I also think I should probably get her a present but have no idea what. I did my first real bit of haggling yesterday which I was quite proud of and managed to get a rucksack for 11,000 TSh (about 4 quid) when the guy originally wanted 18. I even did it in Swahili!
Rather excitingly I am off to Zanzibar next week for a bit of lying around in the sun. Despite the ridiculous heat over here I remain fairly pale thanks to the generous application of factor 50 every morning. Well factor 50 on my face, factor 0 on my legs and have they gone the slightest bit brown? Oh no!
So went to Ngorogoro on Saturday (still all rather grubby after the Maasai night and getting grubbier by the moment with all the dust). It is one of the few places you can still see the black rhino and there are only 27 of them there. Unfortunately on Saturday they all decided to hide and despite the valiant efforts of our driver trying to tell us that a black speck was a rhino I cannot honestly say I saw one. However, I can say that I saw: hyenas, zebras, wildebeest, buffalo, elephants, hippos, flamingos, eagles, vultures, lions (including lions having sex – REALLY!), leopard, antelope, kudu, gazelle, baboons, monkeys (on Sunday), giraffe (on Sunday), pelicans (on Sunday).
It was just incredible.
In a rather blood-thirsty way we were rather hoping for a kill and obviously so were the hyenas who had become so desperate they were eyeing up a zebra on their own! But they failed so we had to make do with mating (see lions earlier), general lounging (in the next life I want to be a hippo), and grid-lock caused by wildebeest!
It really is impossible to convey the scale of safari and just how exciting everything is and because Tanzanian computers are crap I can’t upload photos but some of you lucky people will probably be bored rigid by them in the not too distant future.
On Sunday we went to Lake Manyara which is much smaller but the animals like elephants, giraffes and monkeys tend to be more accessible so the photos are great.
If you EVER get the chance to go on a safari then do. If you EVER get a chance to go with Art in Tanzania – avoid it at all cost.
I have been trying to upload my skydiving pic but it’s huge so you’ll have to wait until I can show it to you in person – or at least find a computer program to make it smaller.
So I’ve finally managed to wash off most of my safari dust (except of course for my feet!) so I thought I would TRY to blog about it but, to be honest, it’s just too big an experience to begin to write about here.
Unfortunately there were a few technical glitches with the organisation – there’s a surprise but despite these I had the most amazing weekend and will bore everyone stupid with my pictures (that small dot in the distance is a leopard honest!).
So Friday spent the night in a Maasai hut which was undescribable – mostly in “I really don’t want to be this dirty or uncomfortable” ways but also in a “I really never thought I would do this” way. Basically a Maasai boma is a mud hut with a fire in the middle (so it’s very warm) and a cow in the room next door. We had three to a bed, well I say bed more of a cow hide stretched across some sugar cane with just enough room for the rats to scamper beneath! At this point we didn’t know we would also be sharing our boma with some chickens and a host of bed bugs (luckily for me one of the boys manfuly took the brunt of the bed bugs in our boma so I only got a few bites).
As for the bathroom facilities well…as our driver said “you have a very large bathroom” waving his arm over all he surveyed. Oh yes, we were back to nature big time. Some people decided to try and cross their legs but a group of about eight of us armed with the toilet roll I’d brought (wouldn’t you just know I would take a toilet roll!) went off in search of a suitable spot. We then formed a human wall and sang loudly so people didn’t get stage fright whilst ‘performing’ as it were!
In fact toilet quality became quite an interesting adventure over the weekend with top marks going to Lake Manyara National Park and bottom marks going to the restaurant where we ate most of the time (yes, that was worying).
Unsurprisingly very few people got much sleep and we were all bright eyed, bushy tailed and desperate to get out of the Maasai village by sunrise. Interesting night time incidents had included the discovery of the notorious bed bugs (mostly in the other boma not ours – as I said we had a kind volunteer manfully taking them all on), a Maasai trying to break the door down to our hut (he’d obviously forgotten his toothbrush!), a cat jumping from the ceiling and landing in the middle of a bunch of (already) hysterical females and the cows relieving themselves every five minutes – not good when you are desperately trying to resist the urge yourself!
So off we went as soon after sunrise as we could – we virtually knocked our driver over when he returned in the morning in our desperate attempt to get in the car.
So did some more Maasai teaching this week and was looking after the beginners which seemed a relatively easy task – teaching weather and so on. Never have I spent such an exhausting 45 minutes! Not that there was anything wrong with my pupils they were perfectly charming but I hadn’t really appreciated that both the guys I was teaching didn’t know how to read or write AT ALL let alone in English.
There is something very strange about teaching two fully grown men (who have spears, knives and the occasional bow and arrow – and one of whom is a medicine man) s-u-n and r-a-i-n.
Luckily I think it went okay but we’ll have to see if they can remember yesterday’s lesson today…
In the sprit of trying new things I think I may have gone a little OTT. Yesterday I jumped out of a plane!
Okay, I was attached to a very nice man from New Zealand called Russell (is it the law that all men from New Zealand are called Russell?) and he had a parachute but it was still jolly scary, exciting, amazing and just about every other adjective.
I can see how it might be quite addictive because as soon as I got down I wanted to do it again! However this is not a practical hobby so I’ll probably try stamp collecting or knitting instead.
Anyway I’m sure I will bore everyone with the photos and the DVD (yes, I decided to have the whole thing filmed!) so I won’t go into too much detail but suffice to say I would recommend anyone who has a chance to do it. Okay, so probably more scenic coming down on a parachute looking at Mount Meru and Kili than say an airfield in Milton Keynes but I ssupect no matter where the location it’s FABULOUS!
Don’t get me wrong i to i is a reasonable company to volunteer with (although you get the impression they prey on your fears of going to a foreign land and volunteering when it isn’t actually that difficult to organise yourself). However at the moment they are really irritating me:
Before I cam out they told me that my accommodation was 10 minutes from the volunteer house. Now it might be 10 minutes in a Formula One car but – surprisingly – there aren’t an awful lot of those in Tanzania. In fact yesterday was the first time I walked directly (ie not through town with a little break) and it took me an hour. Even Paula Radcliffe would take 20 minutes at full tilt. I have told head office in Leeds this but they refuse to believe me and insist it is only 10 minutes – excuse me I’m the one that’s actually here!
A similar incident occurred with the hot water problem, or should I say lack of hot water in the smaller of the volunteer houses. One of the girls there told her friend who is coming out in a couple of weeks that there wasn’t any hot water and showers were somewhat bracing (as far as I can tell there hasn’t been hot water for at least two months). So the friend was somewhat alarmed and phoned head office. Guess what they sadi? That there was plenty of hot water in all the showers and bathrooms! Hmmm…I have been here a month and there has only ever been a warm dribble in one shower in the big house. However according to the people in Leeds they have the most up to date info and obviously those of us who are here are hallucinating!
You may have noticed my dala dala tales have diminished in part that’s because I haven’t been on that many, mostly though it’s because they’ve been strangely uneventful. In fact today I got a seat and everything – quite dull.
I have finished my Swahili lessons which is something of a relief as the archaic teaching methods for two hours every day was doing my head in. Having said that I have learnt some Swahili. I’m not hugely proficient and would probably struggle to engage in a fully-fledged conversation but I can at least ask for things, order food and drinks and make the ladies I teach laugh (I like to think they are laughing with me, I suspect they may be laughing at me). It is quite amusing to try to speak Swahili to the people here as they really don’t expect it so it sort of sends them into a temporary shock which has the effect of everything going just that bit more polepole – not what is needed on most occasions.
My ladies’ English is improving and there are days when I think they’ve really made a breakthrough (these are known as hurrah moments). Then at other times they totally lose the plot (these are known as argh moments). We are currently running at about 2 argh moments for every hurrah moment but considering the ratio was about 5 to 1 a couple of weeks ago, we are moving in the right direction.
Modal verbs floored them this week so I’m going to have to try and find a less tricky way of explaining them (modal verbs are can, could, should, ought, must etc in case you were wondering). They have also told me they want to learn a song so I am frantically going through my ipod to find something suitable. A show tune or hymn would be ideal but I don’t have many of those (surprisingly I do have a few) so I’m hoping the Beatles or Abba will provide a solution. Also two of my better students want to have a debate about whether money is more important than education – phew! I am going to have to do some serious work with the rest this week to even grasp the whole debate concept.
I am really enjoying teaching although it is a real challenge and sometimes if you or one of the students is having a tough day the whole mood of the class goes downhill very quickly. I think I’ll be going back to PR quite quickly, it’s much easier!
