Home again in Tabata Segerea

With my Swahili language intensive wrapped up, I'm settling in to Kaduma's home in Tabata Segerea, Dar es Salaam to kick off my job hunt (not before having a little...okay, lot of...fun and hitting the road one more time). Most of this week was spent reconnecting with old friends and contacts and having a general blast with Kaduma's family. Have I mentioned I love this place? There was plenty of cooking, a good amount of farming and even a couple good adventures with some of her extended family...highlights to follow :) Tomorrow morning, I'm off to Mombasa for a few days, then to Lamu, then back to Mombasa then to Dar. Then to the job hunt..

This day ranked among my favorites this far - Zuhura, Grace Juliette and I hiked to the Dar es Salaam airport so Julie and Grace could check out planes take off and land for the first time. I don't think there are words to explain just how excited Juliette was, but suffice it to say it was well worth the walk! 

More adventures - this one was a trip to City Center with Juliette and Grace - here is Juliette checking out peacocks in the botanical gardens in Dar es Salaam

Full bloom

And the girls at the Indian Ocean on the same trip. We were genuine tourists that day :)

In other miscellany: someone's to go bag for dinner that evening!

Soon to be completed homeowner Luna checking on progress at his new digs!!

Front porch (most important room of the house) under construction!

See you laters and thank you's with the Arusha fam

Surprise Going Away Party

With cake, poems and all!

Mama, Katrina and I with our oldest and youngest brothers Abisai and Alexi

The almost whole famdamn :) (minus Sunday who's the photographer)

The team

Da Boys

Goodbye poems for the Ndosi extensions :)

The guys checking out a volcanic crater lake

And for a little touch of miscellany: fire ants!!! the bain of Arusha's existence

Better Late than Never?

Familiar Territory in Dar es Salaam

Growing like crazy - a crane on every roof top

Bagamoyo 

Climbing the "tree of life" - a walk around this baobab is rumored to add five years to your life

Me talking others into tree hugging (I know, family - even halfway across the world. it's hopeless)

Stone Town Zanzibar

Stone Town Zanzibar

Our Zanzibari digs (Paje, Zanzibar)

The Good Life

Kite surfing (spectating..)

Low tide with the Indian Ocean lost to the horizon

Wooden fishing dhow

Dhow building village

Sail shop

The morning commute

Seaweed Farming

Soap making (with the seaweed farmed in the pic above!)

 Spice Farm Tour

Cinnamon Bark

Climbing for Coconuts

Mbilimbi tree - favorite fruit in the whole wide world. Also the one and only thing in the world that gives me heart burn. But well worth the cost :)

Lichi nuts (thinking of you, Hayes family!)

A coconut tree tapped a few too many times for booze

Turmeric

Fruit tasting

Jozani Forest

Red Colobus Monkeys

Mangrove Swamps

Of Until We Meet Agains

I've never been one for good byes and many of you can attest to the fact that my otherwise tough skin melts away pretty quickly when I'm forced into actually bidding adieu. The completely unexpected but very sweet goodbye party our homestay family had for us yesterday had me near to (okay, okay..actually in..) tears. 'Goodbyes' just feel far too permanent. I suppose my inability to gracefully part ways in some ways explains my habit of never being gone for long.

That said, I'd give the world to be in Indianapolis with my family today, paying respects to a man I was and am proud to call my grandfather. Words can't express just how thankful I am to have such a wonderful model of integrity, morality and fairness in my life. He, together with our grandmother, stood up for what they knew was right even when what was wrong was the norm, and even when it may have been easier to just turn a blind eye. His commitment to justice is something I'll aspire always to match, with the sincere hope that I can do so even half as humbly as he did. Fisher family: while I am sorry I cannot be there in person today, I can't think of a better way to send him on his way than with that favorite Irish blessing of Grandmother's, as best I can remember it:

May the road rise to meet you
May the wind be always at your back
May the sun shine warm upon your face
And until we meet again, may God hold you in the palm of his hand

I trust that will not be the only Irish blessing of the day :)

And now a toast to Papa: To 99 years of a healthy, happy and meaningful life. May we all be so lucky.

Hugs and kisses to all.

Kuoa vs. Kuolewa. Au, kuoana.

The other night, the power at home went out for the first time since we got here, which turned our standard chit chat over dinner into an awesome story telling opportunity. And since we have the good fortune of having a homestay dad who both a gifted storyteller and a kiswahili professor at home as well as work, we got to hear the story of how he and our homestay mother met and married all while learning the major distinctions between a few not-so-very-different-sounding words. In kiswahili, the verb “to marry” is ku-oa…but it’s used only for men. For women, the very is ku-olewa, or the passive form of the first verb to marry which would translate directly to “to be married”. When he and our mama got married though, wali-oana, which is the reciprocal form of the verb meaning that they married one another. Though that last form exists, people rarely seem to use it. The point he was making (or one of them anyway) was that to oana is to have equality in a marriage, to have respect for one another and to approach life from the wedding on after as a mutual undertaking with each party having an equal say, despite societal norms that dictate otherwise. This philosophy, I can dig :) 

A Thank You!

A quick thank you to Chief McCarthy and Michele DeLuca for the hands-down most useful gadget I brought with me to Tanzania:

This little hand crank gizmo kept me able to see with its light, connected with its cell phone charger and entertained with its music during last night’s power outage. Asanteni sana for the very thoughtful gift. I can assure you last night will not be the only time it rescues me.

Rushwa ya Kwanza

*Quick admission - this post isn't new...it's from probably 3 weeks ago but I hadn't been able to publish it for unknown reasons. Same with the next couple I'll try to post. But more current stuff from Zanzibar and our last week in Arusha coming soon :)*

Tanzania, like many developing countries (for lack of a better word) has a relatively prevalent issue of petty corruption. “Everyone wants to eat” as the saying goes, so people with even a little bit of power (like a police officer, a customs official, or in this case a grounds keeper) will abuse that power to extract a small sum from nearly anyone they can. Police will pull you over for speeding (sometimes even if you’re driving the speed limit) and rather than writing you a ticket, they just give you the run around until you cave and offer them a small bribe which Tanzanians call kitu kidogo (a little something), chai (tea), or rushwa (a bribe/kickback). In all my travels, I’d never directly paid one (knowingly, at least). Until Saturday, that is. Our homestay brothers who are now back home from college took Katrina and I on a couple hour hike to check out some waterfalls that are in a conservation area protecting the source of Arusha’s drinking water. There’s a gatekeeper there who charged us a few bucks for the whole group which we figured was standard, at least for people whose skin color makes it so evident that they are foreigners from a (presumably) rich country. We paid and carried on our way until we ran into the grounds keeper who refused to let us pass until we each proved our student status and produced a letter written by officials at our respective universities stating our purpose for being there since the gate keeper had called him to tell him we were students. Of the five of us, only one had brought his student ID along, and we definitely didn’t have a letter announcing our visit. After going back and forth with the guy for at least five minutes, we eventually just hinted that we’d paid a “student rate” at the gate and that instead we should have paid the usual price which was double that. So we pulled together another 5,000 shilingi ($3-ish) to line the guy’s pocket and went on our merry way. The right thing to do? Probably not. The only practical thing to do after having walked uphill for two hours to get to those damn waterfalls? Definitely so. To be perfectly honest, it’s an awful thing, but I’d probably do it all over again (it helps knowing just how worth it those waterfalls were). It’s easy to blame the person. Everyone knows that corruption is universally bad...it’s an abuse of power, it’s illegal, and it’s morally wrong, right? But when a groundskeeper or a customs official or a police officer gets paid next to nothing and rarely receives what he/she does get on time, maybe it’s the system that is to blame rather than the individual. Everyone has to eat, I suppose.

Success! And all it took was a 2 hour hike and a rushwa or two...

A couple of our home stay brothers playing in Mount Meru's waterfalls...and pretending that they're not freezing their asses off. I jumped in for just long enough to get my hair wet and for my whole body to go numb. I think we shivered for a solid hour after we were done!

Arnold and Sunday teaching Katrina and I a new Swahili word - tetemeka = to shiver!

Katrina thinking about it and Sunday's friend Victoria not even considering it