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Thursday, October 5, 2017
Tuesday, September 26, 2017
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Thursday, September 7, 2017
Typical Day in Kigoma
I think my day might be more similar to yours than you might expect. Wake up, drive to work, go home and relax. But the scenery might be a bit different so I wanted to share.
I wake up around 7:00 each weekday. Note the net around the bed. It keeps mosquitoes (and malaria) away from me when I'm sleeping. Usually I start my day browsing the internet a little bit because the network is fastest at this time. (That's how I was finally able to upload the pictures for this post. All other times, it did not work.)
I have breakfast on my porch. Here is my view and you can see Lake Tanganyika from here! Typically I plan to study Swahili in the morning but then I get distracted watering my garden and such.
At 8:00 AM a Seed Change worker, Malilo, comes to my house to pick up the truck and to bring me to work as well. We drive about 40 minutes to get to the nursery everyday.
The nursery where I work. We grow palm tree seedlings that farmers will grow to adulthood and extract palm oil from them. The field has about 30,000 trees! I often start my day by walking through the field and chatting with the Nursery manager.
Some time mid-morning it is tea time. Most employees have their main nutritional needs satisfied at work. So tea time includes tea, of course, with a ton of sugar pre-added. In addition, the cook, Zubaida, serves sweet potatoes (the sweet potatoes are white here as seen on the silver platter) and mandazi, a type of donut. All people share a single tray and eat with their hands.
Now it's time to get to work. You can see the Seed Change office, called the Farmer Resource Center, in the upper left. The field is behind the building. My desk is pictured on the right. Our solar panel for the office has been broken since I arrived in Tanzania so we currently have no electricity at the office, meaning I typically only have half days at the office until my computer dies.
At 12:30 or so, Zubaida calls everyone for lunch. Everyday we have ugali, best described as a dumpling made with maize flour and water. This is a staple in all Tanzanian diets. To accompany the ugali, we have either beans (pictured above) or dagaa, a type of dried sardine. I prefer the beans by a lot. The structure of the lunch is the same everyday. The women go inside a little tent and sit on the floor of the tent (you can see the green tent floor in the picture). The men sit just outside the tent on little benches. Everyone washes their hands with a bucket of water that is passed around. All the ladies share a single large tray (the men have their own tray). You must pinch off a piece of ugali to roll in your hand. Then you take the rolled ugali and dip it in the accompanying sauce and toss the whole thing in your mouth. Everyone eats with the right hand because the left hand is for the bathroom and may be unclean. After you are finished eating, you wash your hands again with a bucket of clean water.
I've since learned that this is not a standard process everywhere in Tanzania. One person said that perhaps sharing a single dish is an Islamic custom. I'm not sure the situation but this is how we do it at my workplace.
After lunch, my computer is typically completely dead and it is time for me to head home to continuing working. I have dragged my desk out onto my porch and have a little office area set up there. It is very peaceful and allows me to focus well while also enjoying electricity.
I finish work around 5:00 PM usually. The evening is free and there are not a lot of things to do in the tiny town of Kigoma. However, one of my favorite places to go is Lake Tanganyika. I go to a private beach where it is not inappropriate to wear a bikini and just enjoy the water and the beach. The main drawback of this beach is that there are little thief monkeys who will steal any food you may try to bring!
At this point, my day is over and it's time to cook dinner, study some Swahili and go to bed.
Friday, September 1, 2017
Wednesday, August 23, 2017
Sunday, August 20, 2017
Saturday, August 19, 2017
Gombe National Park: Seeing the Chimps
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| Waiting for the boat |
The boat driver promised to meet us at the lake at 7:00 sharp but African time is always very fluid. We arrived at the beach around 8:00 but our boat wasn’t there. I called around a bit and we finally determined that, although we had arrived more than an hour late, the boat was still on the way from the driver's village. Finally, after about 45 more minutes, a rickety boat arrived and the driver introduced himself. No lifejackets and a tiny motor but…when in Rome…
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| First Boat |
But it was our lucky day! This boat had other foreigners who were also going to Gombe! Our boat clearly wasn’t getting fixed anytime soon so I asked if we could just switch into that one. After a quick exchange of a gas canister from the old boat to the new one, we were on our way again!
It was a smooth ride the rest of the way. This boat was much nicer and even had three life jackets, a small roof, and, most importantly, a functioning motor. After checking in at the park and paying a $125 park fee (I now remembered why I never did any touristy things in Rwanda), we were ready to go. It was at this point that I realized just how lucky we were with the new boat because we were the only people to arrive at the park that day! Imagine if our first boat had been a little later!
Except I didn’t want to! These men do not regularly deal with out-of-shape Americans like me. They spend all their days climbing these mountains and were going super quick. We hiked up this mountain for about two hours total. It doesn’t sound long but it is truly one of the most strenuous hikes I have done because of the speed and the gradient.
FINALLY, we arrived at the chimps. To be completely frank, I was glad to see them just because that meant we could stop going up the mountain and I could take a water break without anyone rushing me along. The chimps were…fine. They charge at us sometimes because chimps are nasty creatures. They were cool I guess.
The hike down wasn’t any easier. My shoes were really slippery on the steep slope and I was sliding all over the place. I now have a trophy bruise on my butt from the time I slid on a rock and fell.
As lame as it sounds, perhaps my favourite part of the day was when I got back on the boat. The hike itself was beautiful (although faster than I prefer) and the chimps were dynamic. But after a broken boat and a damaged body, I was just ready to go home. So overall, it’s a solid African story with all the complexities, but I’d prefer not many more of those. I’m done being a tourist for a while.
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