Just Call Me Farmhand Elizabeth

A couple weekends ago, I was invited to a camping party/event at one of my student's homes outside Iringa. The student, Bruce, is from a Greek family and they live a couple hours away in a town called Nzihi. Here he is, on the left with his arm around John's neck and Pariza looking on:

They, along with several other families of Greek heritage, own tobacco farms in the area. I was going to go with a few other teachers, but for various reasons they had to bow out - so on Saturday the 14th, I took my first daladala (small minivan/bus) ride in Tanzania, down to Nzihi.

I was the first one to arrive, so Bruce and his brother Robin took the time to show me around their spacious farm: they have goats, sheep, cows, and chickens, as well as tobacco fields. Bruce enjoys biking around the farm and hanging out with the animals - to say that he loves animals would be an understatement. Once I gave my class a short writing assignment with the prompt, "If you could be any animal, what would you be?" He said that he would be a work horse, because "you work all day and then you get carrots and other sweet treats from your owner" and "you get to do good things like plow fields and gallop around." He's totally obsessed with bison and buffalo, and last week he made up a spectacular rap song about hybrid animals. Here are some of the lyrics:

We classify animals, like a crocodile-

That is a reptile.

A falcon is a bird, a human is a mammal.

A human is clever

to put a lion and a tiger together.

Wait 10 months and out comes - a baby liger!

You do the same thing for a zebra and a horse

And out comes - a baby zorse!

And then the mother and the father got a divorce!

There's more, about the echidna and the platypus, and suffice to say my students will never forget the hybrids or the two monotremes of the mammal world. Anyway, the kid just has a sweet disposition and is so fun in class. So I was happy to visit his home and have him show me around.

So we took a bike ride around the place, and he showed me the cattle and his favorite farm animal, the donkey. Here's some of the open space around the livestock area:

He also enjoys riding the donkey in his spare time and insisted that I take a picture of it:

His brother Robin, a Senior 2 student, joined us a little later in the afternoon and was shocked to learn that I had never driven a tractor before. Since he plows some of the fields, he ran to the barn and got the tractor out to teach me to drive it. It's basically a car with a manual gearshift, only louder and more temperamental. But here I am on my maiden excursion:

After I drove around a few fields, stalling the thing twice in my clumsy gear-shifting attempts and accidentally going in reverse once, we walked over to the milking barn. The cows had returned from grazing and were ready to be milked. They were also apparently ready to stare me down:

Bruce and Robin were even more shocked that I had never milked a cow, so they told their workers to let me give it a try.

First I had to wash my hands with some special soap:

Then, after a quick demonstration from one of the workers, I got to it. Bruce served as camera man.

It took me a few minutes, but I sort of got the hang of it. The key is to use just 2 fingers and pull gently. But you also have to aim for the bowl, because otherwise the milk just shoots everywhere and no one gets to drink it. But it was a fun experience and the kids got a kick out of watching me.

In the evening, Bruce lit a campfire in a big open-air fireplace they have and we ate some really good Greek food.

There were other school families and students there, so it was fun to talk with them outside school. Everyone camped out around the lawn, and after breakfast the next morning I caught a ride back with another of my student's families - just in time to go to yet another student's birthday party, which was Sunday afternoon. It was a student-filled weekend!

Mambo, I Mean Hello, I Mean 你好, I Mean…

In terms of unexpected curveballs, this was a pretty good one. It started with a telephone call I got at school 3 weeks ago, on the Wednesday before Halloween – another teacher came into my room after school and said someone was on the phone waiting to talk to me. Totally clueless as to who it could be, I went to the office and the secretary, Upendo, told me that it was a woman named Mrs. Arbi, who has children in P5, S2, S4, and A-level. I know her kids and teach them PE, but had no idea why she would want to talk to me. The conversation went as follows:

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Me: Hello?

Mrs. Arbi: Hi Miss Elizabeth, I was wondering if you were free this afternoon to come to our factory and talk to our workers. We have some questions for them.

Me (searching for information): Uh…well, I am free at the moment, but what do you want me to say to your workers?

Mrs. Arbi: Well, we need to ask them some things, and Kristeen [IIS principal] said you might be able to translate for us.

Me: Oh! OK…where are they from?

Mrs. Arbi: They are from China. And we don’t know any Chinese, and no one else does either, so we were really hoping you could help us out.

Me: Uh…well, I can try, but I’m certainly not fluent and I don’t know a lot of machinery-related words. But I’ll do my best.

Mrs. Arbi: OK, thank you, I will come pick you up at school in 15 minutes!

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After hanging up the phone, I recalled hearing that the Arbis own a couple of factories south of Iringa. So I hustled back to my classroom and tried to get on the internet to look up some words I thought I might need to know. To my immense chagrin, the internet connection at school was on the fritz, so I racked my brain trying to remember the words for factory, machine, and others. In an all-too-short time, Mrs. Arbi came to take me to the factory.

On the drive there, I learned that we were going to the family biscuit factory. They also own a candy factory, but this biscuit endeavor is relatively new. They opened the factory 2 years ago and recently decided that they needed to increase their output to meet the demand for their product. So where did they look to get more bigger, more efficient biscuit making and packing machines? China, of course. And Shanghai, to be specific.

So they ordered these machines from China, and the company sent 3 workers along with the machines to supervise the installation. Naturally, they did not send a translator with them, and none of these 3 guys spoke any English more than “hello,” “thank you,” and, ironically, “no smoking.” These workers had been in Iringa for a week or so, and they had managed to communicate with the Arbis and with the other workers (both the Tanzanians and the Indian technicians) through miming and gesturing. Apparently this stage in the work necessitated actual verbal communication, and Mrs. Arbi had mentioned the issue with Kristeen, who told her that I lived in China last year and might be able to help out.

As we pulled into the factory, Mrs. Arbi told me that today I should introduce myself, then help them get just a few issues sorted out. Then I could come back the next week because they would have more questions then. I reiterated that I would do my best. We walk into the factory and I approach 2 Chinese men, and I hear them yell for another guy to come over, saying (in Chinese) that “the translator is here.” I realized that out of sheer luck, I’m wearing a polo shirt I got in Beijing from Tsinghua University with the school name and logo on it. I know this will earn me immediate credibility, since Tsinghua is one of the best (if not the best) universities in China. And I’m right, because they tell me so in our first few minutes of conversation. Here's a picture of me with two of them, Mr. Wang and Mr. Pan:

I shake hands with the men, introduce myself, and tell them why I have a shirt from Tsinghua. They ask where I lived in China, and I try to tell them, but the standard confusion results from no one knowing where Xintang is. But they know Changsha and Hengyang. I gain more credibility by telling them that I have a friend who is a teacher at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, another very highly regarded college in China. Then we get down to business. Mrs. Arbi asks me to ask them, “Will you be putting insulation around these oven pipes? Because if you don’t, the oil going through the pipes will heat them up and burn the workers.”

Now, this would have been a stretch for my Chinese skills at their peak last June/July. But having completely subsumed Chinese in my brain in the interest of learning Kiswahili, I was digging pretty hard for words. I managed to ask them, “You know that soft stuff you put around pipes, to keep the heat in?” And they knew, and told me the word. So I then asked, “When are you going to put insulation on the pipes? Because the pipes have oil, and oil is very hot.” Not a perfect translation, but they definitely understood and assured me that they would insulate the pipes as soon as all the installations were done. I was relieved that my aural comprehension was still pretty good, so I was able to convey the message to Mrs. Arbi, who also looked relieved.

We continued for a good hour and a half. For the first half, Mrs. Arbi would tell me something to tell them in English, and I would say it in Chinese. Then her husband showed up, and he started telling her things in Arabic to tell me in English, for me to tell the workers in Chinese. They also told me a few jokes to make, which were practically beyond my abilities with Chinese but I did my best. Topics of conversation included trying to fix a sensor on a packing machine, trying to adjust the temperature on another packing machine, and asking them to fix a machine from a different Chinese factory. They refused because it wasn’t from their factory, and I had to explain to Mrs. Arbi that they weren’t trying to be difficult, it’s just that asking a Chinese person to fix something outside of their job parameters is like asking them to fix an alien spaceship. I also mediated a heated and much overdue, it seemed, discussion regarding their salaries.

Once all of the questions had been answered, Mrs. Arbi said she would drive me back up to school to get the things I had left there. As I was saying goodbye to the workers, they invited me to have dinner with them. They were staying in the Arbi’s home during their time here, and cooked Chinese food each night. I wanted to, but just had too many things to do that night and promised them that I would eat with them the next time I came to the factory.

On the way back to school, I convinced Mrs. Arbi that when I returned the next week for the second round, things would go much more smoothly if she gave me the questions beforehand so I could look up relevant vocabulary. She assented and said that she would give me a call when they needed me again.

That call came exactly a week later, two Wednesdays ago. She called IIS and asked if I could come that day after school. Kristeen told me at about 1:30, and Mrs. Arbi was going to come pick me up at 3:30. I got Kristeen to call her back and get the questions from her, and once school got out I got onto my favorite Chinese dictionary website (thank goodness the internet was working) and looked up words from the list of questions. Good thing I did, since words like “furnace coil,” “dough feeder,” and “boiler chimney” were on there. As another teacher, Kelly, put it, it was like I was having a final exam and practically no time to study. But I printed out the Chinese characters for the words I didn’t know, in case my pronunciation was incomprehensible, was ready to go just at 3:30, and hopped into Mrs. Arbi’s van to head to Round 2.

We arrived at the factory a little before 4, and the workers greeted me with smiles. We got right down to business, with me asking questions about how to operate the new boiler: how much oil does it need? Does the oil need to be changed, and if so, how often? Why are there 2 motors here instead of one? At what temperature can the machine be turned off? And so on. Having answered those questions, we headed inside to the biscuit producing and packing machines, where I asked the workers if they could make the production machine send out biscuits in perfectly straight lines, if there was a way to adjust the thickness of the biscuits, and more.

And then, because things weren’t quite complicated enough, one of the Indian technicians who spoke a bit of English came over, saw that I was translating, and said that he had a few questions for the workers too. He grabbed the sheet of paper I had with the questions on it, turned it over, and scribbled a few questions about oil filters, biscuit molds, and more. Again, I had to resort to a bit of pantomiming and circuitous “you know that thing…” questions to get the point across. Somewhat miraculously, they actually understood and answered the questions. By the end, I felt like I was in the UN or something: there were the Indian techs speaking Hindi and Gujarati to each other; there was Mr. Arbi speaking Arabic; there were Tanzanian factory workers speaking Kiswahili, and I had to talk to them too; there were me and Mrs. Arbi speaking English; and there were me and the Chinese workers, speaking Mandarin. And everyone was talking to me because I was the go-between. It was quite a mental workout to keep it all straight, I must say.

Finally, at about 6, all the questions had been answered and all parties were as satisfied as could be with the interlingual exchange. The workers invited me to eat with them again. After confirming with Mrs. Arbi that I could get a ride back home, I agreed and headed to the Arbi’s home, which is enormous! One of their daughters showed me around, then the workers came back and started cooking. I watched them cook, and the Arbi girls stayed with me to watch. I think the workers enjoyed the audience. Here's one of the men, Mr. Wang, plucking and washing a chicken:

And another guy, Mr. Yu, stir-frying it:

They cooked 2 chickens, some green vegetables, and tomato and egg soup:

Of course, they cooked them Shanghai style, which means not very spicy and even a bit sweet…so not even close to the extreme heat I experienced with Hunan food, but it was still really tasty. They cooked one chicken dish I hadn't had before:

Eating with them was like a flashback; here I was in Tanzania, gnawing chicken meat off bones and leaving the bones on the table, taking little bites from communal dishes and putting them right into my mouth, just like last year. And we had a decent conversation too, as good as my limited skills would allow. Here they are at dinner:

Of course, eating with Chinese people also allowed me to continue my series of posts on weird foods I've tried (which have been sorely lacking here). They cook the whole chicken, of course, including the 2 items on the rooster that, in Chinese, are called the "chicken eggs." I'll let you figure out what they actually are, but they are a delicacy so as the guest I was supposed to eat time. Here's what they looked like:

I've had much worse tasting things. They were actually fairly flavorless, but with the unpleasant chewy/mealy/cartilage-y texture you might expect. Dipped in soy sauce they weren't bad.

After dinner, I thanked them and they invited me back to for dinner on the next Sunday, as they were leaving on Monday. Of course I said sure, so yesterday I headed back to the Arbi home for the best Chinese food I’ll ever get in Iringa. This time, they cooked 2 chicken dishes, an egg soup that was more like a custard, and wood ear mushrooms that they had harvested from the firewood in the Arbi’s backyard! Since the rainy season started last week, I guess these mushrooms started growing on the uncovered wood and the Chinese workers saw them and decided to put them to good use. Here's the dish:

All the dishes were really good, and after dinner we sat around and chewed on watermelon seeds, a really popular snack in China:

Jenny, the best student at OYY, loves them. We talked about Tanzanian food, the limited selection of veggies (in their eyes, and I can understand why), and the men showed me pictures of their families. Around 9, I got up to leave. One of them gave me his card and said when I go back to Shanghai I should call him, which I said sounded fine. Another said if I come back to China, I should marry his 23-year old son, which I said didn’t sound fine. And the last said thanks for helping out. I wished them a safe journey and left.

So ended my unexpected review and practice of Mandarin, 4 months after I thought I wouldn’t have to use it again unless I returned to China. But it was nice to realize that I hadn’t forgotten everything, and it was also nice to know that some knowledge I had picked up was of genuine and unique benefit to some people here in Iringa.

By the way, in case the title of this post is still unclear, “mambo” is a Kiswahili greeting people use a lot around here. It means “what’s up,” so it’s a bit slangy but everyone uses it. And the Chinese characters mean “nĭ hăo,” or “hello.”

In my next post: my camping trip last weekend to one of my student's farms.

Stand Back, They Want Candy

Warning: this is the longest post I’ve done in a while. Read in installments if desired.

Since I started teaching, Halloween has become one of those days on which I always wonder, “Was I like these guys as a child?” and fervently hope that the answer is in the negative. But in all likelihood I was just like them, since apparently kids all over the world are exactly the same when they see large quantities of candy in the offing. I know that it’s just a result of getting really excited, and that the crowd mentality takes over (I want more candy than that tiny 15-kilo 5-year-old in front of me!), but man. It’s definitely a good thing that Halloween only comes once a year.

If you remember last year’s Halloween post, you recall descriptions of me dressed as a witch, literally getting chased around OYY by packs of shrieking children up to the age of 15 or 16 who were willing to climb over their grandmothers to get a Sugar Daddy or Twizzler. I also had a cold at the time, which probably made it seem slightly more intense than it was, but children chasing after you are children chasing after you no matter how stuffy your sinuses are. At least it just entailed a bit of planning, 60 minutes of craziness, and then it was over.

This year, Halloween took over a bit more of my time leading up to the event, because I’m the teacher sponsor of the Primary School Student Council. Last year was the first time the Student Council existed, and Kristeen (the principal) was the sponsor. They held a Halloween Party then, so naturally the kids really wanted to hold a party this year. I said OK, why not, and had them tell me what they wanted at the beginning of October. Of course, their answer was “CANDY!!” I’m sure that had known who Willy Wonka was, they would have wanted me to recreate his factory. Instead, they told me a few games they wanted—some feasible, some spectacularly difficult (All-school blindfolded candy hunt? 5-hour party followed by scary movie?), and I told them I’d do my best to make it happen.

Items that were possible on their wish list included: raffle prizes for ticketholders; various games; Piñatas; a Haunted House; and going trick-or-treating at the end of the party. After consulting with Kristeen, we settled on a 2-hour party on a Friday afternoon, open to all IIS students and their families. And I got to work buying raffle prizes (in Dar during midterm break) and outrageous amounts of candy, enlisting teachers and Senior Student Council members to help run games, fleshing out the party schedule, asking families who live near the school if they’d mind being a trick-or-treating stop, and making a dozen papier-maché piñatas (which took me a pretty solid portion of last weekend). I daresay it was actually sort of a good thing that, in parallel with last year, I caught a cold last weekend, so I didn’t feel the need to fit in exercise after school this past week.

My students were also pretty helpful, in their own frenetic way: they like Halloween, and they like art, so during our combined P5/P6 Art and Craft class on Tuesday they decorated the piñatas…to varying degrees. There was paint spilled, tissue paper everywhere, and kids running around with various art implements. A water fight broke out amongst some of the boys toward the end, which was so hilarious that Hugh (the P5 teacher) and I laughed for about 5 minutes before we were able to control ourselves enough to tell them to stop.

My students were also excited about having a Haunted House, so they went to work on Thursday in my room, turning it into a complete mess. They covered the windows with newspaper and cloth to make it dark; threw yarn around the room to mimic spiderwebs; scattered leaves on the floor for sound effect; drew lots of little scary pictures to hang up around the room; and became virtual prison wardens, threatening other students who tried to peek in with the most severe of punishments. They even spent some of their time at the party helping in the Haunted house: while a Senior 2 student played the scariest music I could find in my iTunes Library (thank you, Linkin Park, A.F.I, and "Thriller"), they donned capes and hid in corners, then jumped out and screamed at the kids that came in two at a time. Other less vocal students banged metal cans together and grabbed kids' ankles to heighten the effect. I have to say, from the outside it sounded like a pretty frightening spectacle – you could hear screaming, clanging, banging, howling, and, underneath it all, the tiniest undercurrent of angry emo music. My kids definitely undertook the project with gusto, and the outcome was all the better for it. Here's one of my students, Pariza, guarding the Haunted House in her cat costume:

I broke down the party thusly: the various games would be open from 3-4:30 PM, with each game manned by a volunteer equipped with several bags of various types of candy. The Haunted House would be open from 4-4:30 only (which proved to be enough), and then at 4:30 everyone would gather together for the announcement of the winners of the Costume Contest. Raffle prize winners would also be drawn at that time. We had Pin the Hat on the Witch (think Pin the Tail on the Donkey, but seasonally apropos):

a Beanbag Toss (3 tries to toss the beanbag into various receptacles):

Basketball Shooting (make a basket, win a Twizzler - thanks for sending those, Mom!):

the Sand in the Cups game (put a prize in the bottom of a yogurt cup, fill the cup with sand, then have kids select cups at random to win prizes):

a Ball Throwing game, Musical Chairs (run by Maria, who you see in the background dressed as a fairy):

and of course the Piñatas. Let me talk about these for a minute. Like I said, they took me the better part of a weekend to make, and I knew they'd be destroyed, but I was fine as long as they would go to good use. And did they ever! I made 12 of them, one didn't make it through the papier-maché process, and 2 were in pretty bad shape after they got "decorated" by my students, so I used those for Spanish Club on Thursday (the day before the party). This was actually the best thing I could have done, because then the Senior students in Spanish Club got so excited about the Halloween party that 2 more volunteered to help, including one really responsible one named Olle (pronounced OOH-lay, he's Swedish). I knew that whoever ran Piñatas at the party would have several mini-riots on his/her hands, so I was pleased when Olle wanted to be in charge of it. And he did a great job of maintaining some semblance of order, making sure kids took turns and went through the ritual of getting blindfolded and turning around. He even got them to share the candy when it fell out, which is a minor miracle. Some of them thought that if you broke it, you got all the candy in the piñata. Yeah right.

Anyway, the piñatas got so much attention that Maria didn't even have to do Musical Chairs for the first 45 minutes of the party because so many kids were just content to hover around, eyeing the piñata and waiting to pounce. Here's a picture I particularly like because you can see the kids in the background recoiling from the follow-through of the blindfolded kid's swing (though they weren't within range):

But they have no problem leaping into the fray for the spoils:

I set up all the stations, and most of the Senior student volunteers got there a bit early like I told them to so I could explain what they were to do. Another teacher and I got the refreshments set up on time as well, and some parents were kind enough to bring supplements, so the table was practically breaking under the weight of juices, donuts, cookies, popcorn, etc. It did some raging business:

So basically during the party, I ran around with a big tote bag loaded down with candy and paper bags—checking on the various game stations and passing out candy reloads; making sure the refreshments table was adequately stocked; maintaining order around the Haunted House; smiling and saying hello to parents who were in attendance; moving prizes and other items around to get ready for the 4:30 prize giveaways; and checking on Adam, who I had enlisted to sell tickets at the gate. He decided he needed some sort of apparatus for his head to make him look more official...you be the judge:

Somewhat ironically, I didn’t even have a costume on because I didn’t have time to make one. Oh well. I fortunately got a teacher to serve as event photographer, so we’ve got some nice pictures.

At 4:30, we rounded everyone up and gave away the prizes I had gotten in Dar and Iringa, to much shouting and general frenzy. In this picture, you can see the kid on the left with the green bag holding the giant bubble wand that was one of the Costume Contest prizes:

The other prizes were some art supplies, some chocolate bars, a big kite, an 8-in-1 game set, and the grand prize for the raffle, a giant tennis ball (which I bought in Dar). Maria then decided to attempt to throw candy to the crowd of students:

Let’s just say that one try at that was enough. At about 4:45, we managed to marshal all the kids and their parents to the school gate to begin our 7-stop trick-or-treating route. A few kids went home, but as we left the gate, we were definitely at least 75 people strong, including parents and 3 teachers (myself, Maria, and Pinky, the P2/P3 helper). A few preschool families decided to come too, but brought their cars; so we had a vehicular escort. It was quite the spectacle, as the looks on the faces of the Tanzanian people we encountered told us.

The first victim of our rampage was one of the preschool helpers, a Tanzanian named Angela who is unlucky enough to live in the home closest to school. I asked her to help, and had to explain what Halloween was to her. I gave her candy on Friday morning and told her to be at home between 4:40 and 5, and true to her word she was there to face the mob of children who had become rabid candy-eating hyenas. They pushed into her house, and she kept walking backwards until she was standing against the wall of the front room of her house! After that, Maria and I broke the kids into 2 waves, to walk to the homeowner distributing candy and then get out of the way. Some families broke off along the way as we continued on our walk, but by stop 7 (which we didn’t reach until about 5:40) we still had a solid group of kids and parents (though more were now in their cars). The entire way, Maria, Pinky and I were doing our best to act as a human wall in front of, behind, and to the sides of the kids. If the measure of our success is child safety, I’d say we did pretty well because no one got even close to hurt.

Here are a few extra pictures of kids with especially cool costumes. First, Darth Vader, who was one of the winners for Scariest Costume, with his prize - the Biggi Bubble. He's flanked by two boys dressed as ninjas (they're brothers):

Next, Alfie, a P1 dressed as a pirate:

And finally, Bruce, one of my students:

If you knew him, you'd know why his attire (a hunter-gatherer/caveman/generic prehistoric dude) is so perfect for him. Basically, he just loves animals, particularly the bison, so his outfit is sort of an homage to the time when his favorite animals ran free and untroubled. And yes, that is a wig. Here's what he looks like on a regular day:

Most of the kids went home with their accompanying parents after they had extracted every particle of candy that they could from the final stop on our route, but Maria and I walked the remaining students back to school and got back at just about 6. One of the cleaning ladies was nice enough to wait for me, even though I told her I was coming back after trick-or-treating to clean up the impressive mess that had been created around the game stations and in my room (the Haunted House). So she and I, plus the two school guards who were on duty at the time, set about on a high-speed cleaning spurt. In a satisfyingly efficient performance, we had the entire game area, refreshment table, staff area, and my room cleaned by 7. Then we moved tables and chairs back into the right rooms, and I organized the staff room a bit and turned off some computers in the lab that had been left on somehow. As I left, I gave the guards all the remaining candy (not much – a single bag that had somehow gotten hidden under my desk), a container of brownies that a student had brought for the refreshments table but had left in my room, and a bunch of juice boxes (they’re actually tetrahedral, but that’s another story). They were really nice to help me.

Thus ended the Halloween Party and its related responsibilities. Like I said, good thing it only comes once a year.

No, We Are Not Paying For That: Part Two

And now, the conclusion to the story of our trip to Dar:

We woke up on Thursday and had breakfast at the resort restaurant, since it was included in the room rate. We ate at a table on the beach, and got to have a good look in daylight at our surroundings. The beach sand was bright white, and the Indian Ocean was nice and clear and brilliant blue, just how an ocean should be. We saw a few other groups of vacationers around, white people and Indians, and of course there were the requisite beach vendors, trolling up and down the beach trying to sell everything from small tables to sunglasses to jewelry.

On our way back to our room, we asked the receptionist to call a cab to take us to the ferry. After a quick stop in our room, we returned to reception to take our taxi, and our good friend Jumanne was manning the desk. We left our room key at the window, standard practice when leaving resorts for day trips, and this fun conversation ensued:

Jumanne: I have an issue I must tell you about with the room rates.

Maria (guardedly): Yes?

Jumanne: You see, the room rate is for 2 people. But you are 3 people. So you must pay an additional 50% of the room rate, which is the fee for an extra person.

Elizabeth: OK, hang on. First, the woman on the phone that we made our reservation with didn’t say anything about paying extra.

Maria: And I clearly told her that we were 3 people.

Elizabeth: And, we were told that we would have to pay an extra 50% if we got an extra bed in the room. But we didn’t. We shared the bed in the room, and one of us paid for breakfast this morning, so we’ve paid for everything we’re supposed to pay for.

Jumanne: Yes, but you are three. The woman on the phone, she should have told you this.

Maria: But she didn’t. You guys really need to work on your training or something, because these little miscommunication issues are too much.

Jumanne (glancing at taxi driver): OK, I do not want to take your time now, we can settle this when you return. Have a good day.

So with that matter unresolved, but ready to show our obdurate sides once more that evening, we headed to the city. We crossed the bay on the ferry and walked past the fish market and the Prime Minister’s “white house,” to an area that Maria knows well because she worked at a radio station in the neighborhood for a few months. We saw this motivating billboard:

And this guy, selling shoes that he had just finished washing:

First we went to a little bookstore, situated right next to a food court, where all the prices were in British pounds and I got a book to read on the beach the next day. Maria says I should put this picture up because she really likes this pizza place:

Then we headed to a cosmetics store because we were under orders from Anne to get her some moisturizer with some very specific features. We found a few that met every criterion but one, so we decided to keep looking. Here's one of the streets we walked down: for the most part, if you stay off the main road, the streets are tree-lined and fairly pleasant to walk down as long as you avoid the manic taxi drivers.

Then came one of the highlights of the trip: lunch…at Subway! There’s a Subway in City Centre, and we met Hugh there to indulge our cravings for normal, made-to-order sandwiches. Unfortunately they didn’t have plain old turkey or chicken, so I got pastrami. They did have local flavors such as Chicken Tikka, Pizza (?), and others. That restaurant must do some pretty raging business, because the whole time we were in there, those workers were turning out sandwiches for expat after expat. We also saw this little kiosk, which, I kid you not, was smack in the middle of the highway on a median:

After lunch, we drove Sara to the International School of Tanganyika, where she was to meet up with the principal and talk shop about teaching preschoolers. We then made our way to Mlimani City, a big shopping mall with the most talked-about store in Dar: Game. Every time I asked Kristeen if some random item was available in Iringa/Tanzania (tennis balls that weren’t absurdly overpriced, glitter, electronics), she would say, “If you can’t get it here, you can try Game. If Game doesn’t have it, it’s not in Tanzania.” So I had high expectations for this place.

It was basically the Target of Tanzania. Electronics, home appliances and furnishings, toys and games, sports equipment, and more. Tennis balls were still outrageously expensive (Tsh 11,000 for a 4-ball can? That’s like US $2.25 per ball!), but I found some good prizes for the IIS Halloween Party Raffle, and got a balance ball as well for about Tsh 16,000, which I thought was pretty good.

Then we headed to Shop Rite, the massive grocery store also in Mlimani City. Now, because you can get quite a few things in Iringa that weren’t available in Xintang last year, it certainly wasn’t as exciting as heading to Carrefour after a couple of months at OYY. But it was fun to go to a big grocery store with aisles and just browse for a little while. I did find a giant tennis ball on the toy aisle, which I reasoned could be used for a raffle prize. So I bought it.

Hugh and Maria bought a few things, then we drove back to the bookstore/food court area to reunite with Sara. We saw a few of these 3-wheeled carts, called bajajis in Kiswahili - but we didn't ride in them:

Hugh dropped us off and left to meet up with some friends, so the 3 of us had dinner – and soft serve ice cream, something you can’t get in Iringa. I had a vague notion that I would try to find gelato or frozen yogurt, but quickly realized that those have not entered the scene in Tanzania yet. So I settled for soft serve with caramel on top, and it was just fine. We went back to the cosmetics store, bought the moisturizer that we thought would best suit Anne, and took a taxi back to the ferry. We boarded the ferry on foot, then took another taxi back to Sunrise.

Upon returning, we had the fun conclusion of our second price point discussion with Jumanne. I don’t really need to include the dialogue here, because apparently at some point during the day he or the GM had just decided that they weren’t going to get anywhere arguing with us. Basically, he just said that he understood our point and then made some comment like, “the next time, you cannot do this” or “the next time, you must pay our normal rates.” Maria responded with, “well—there probably won’t be a next time.” That caught his attention immediately, and he suddenly became totally cooperative and friendly in helping us figure out where to move for Friday night. He showed us a Standard Room, which was way small, and then offered up the Permanent Tents as an option – secure tents with mattresses and mosquito nets right on the beach, much cheaper than any of the rooms and with shared bathrooms and showers that were really clean and had hot water as well. So we opted for the tents on Friday night. With that discussion concluded, we headed to our room.

In our room, we discovered that the AC wasn’t working. It hadn’t exactly been stellar the night before, and we had asked Reception to send someone in to fix it during the day. They forgot, but to their credit sent the AC man over at this point to fix it. Apparently the problem wasn’t easily fixed, however, so we got moved to the next Executive Room to spend the night. This room’s
AC worked like a charm, so we spent Thursday night in air conditioned comfort.

We planned to spend Friday at the beach, and that’s what we did. After a leisurely breakfast, we moved our stuff out of the Executive Room and into our tents on the beach, which were also equipped with a table and a few chairs out front, as you can see here:

We were conveniently located right behind a volleyball net as well:

So we borrowed a volleyball (free!) and spent some time after breakfast attempting to play, with a small degree of success. Here's me waiting to hit the ball:

And here's the result:

Failure.

At one point a random guy came up and asked to play with us, but he wasn’t any better than any of us and had a weird friend who started doing pushups in the sand…if he was trying to impress us, it didn’t work. Anyway, they left around 11 and we spent a couple hours reading and relaxing, and of course wading in the ocean. A couple of Masai men walked past us, and Maria got really excited and wanted to take pictures with them. So here are Sara, Maria, and me with our Masai friends:

Hugh and Maria’s friend Sia joined us for lunch, and after lunch we gave volleyball another go. We had more success this time because we had a few more people, and we got a couple of decent games in. I’ve been trying to add an overhand serve to my pathetic volleyball repertoire, and while it looks like an awkward tennis serve, it now goes over the net. Baby steps. After volleyball, Maria went and got a massage, and we splashed around in the ocean some more. I read more of my book and went on a little run along the shore, which was nice. If you run faster than the vendors, they can’t try and sell you anything. I basically ran as far as I could until I hit a river with no visible method of crossing, then turned and headed back, doing my best to find the firmest ground and not sink into the sand up to my ankles. Easier said than done. We also saw a minor migration:

We went to dinner at the resort restaurant, and a cricket match was playing on the TV. Hugh, being Australian, is a major cricket fan and was kind enough to teach me the rules of the game as we were watching. And just now I went back and looked at the pictures I took when I visited Melbourne Cricket Ground in February, and everything makes a lot more sense. Just like every other sport, once you play the rules become pretty clear—but having never played, getting someone who knows a lot about it while watching high quality play is the next best thing.

We left Sunrise around 7 on Saturday morning to start the trip back to Dar, but had a few planned and unplanned stops along the way. First, we picked up Adam near the ferry. He spent the week in Zanzibar, so we met up with him to give him a ride back to Iringa. Then we stopped at the hotel that Hugh had stayed at for 2 nights because he lost his iPod somewhere, and wanted to check the room he had had. Unfortunately, no luck. Then we drove for a few solid hours, and stopped at a hotel/restaurant called the Tan-Swiss on the road back to Iringa for lunch. After lunch, we hadn’t been driving for more than 30 minutes when we started to smell burning rubber, then heard a POP, and the ride got a little bouncier. We got a flat tire.

But Hugh was totally prepared, so we got out the temporary tire, the jack, and the reflective triangles from the trunk. Adam and Hugh changed the tire in good time, and we were back on our way within about 20 minutes. The temporary tire got us back to Iringa just fine, through one more stop at an outpost named Al-Jazeera (yeah, I thought it was just a TV station as well) and through several pauses at roadblocks coming up the big hill to Iringa.

So that’s it for my midterm vacation! We’ve got about 7 straight weeks of school coming up now, but I’m feeling refreshed and ready to dig back in to the daily grind. I’ll be sure to write about the IIS Halloween Party, which is this coming Friday, and for which I am the party planner (as I am the teacher leading the Primary School Student Council, which is hosting the party). Thanks for reading.

No, We Are Not Paying For That: Part One

We’re back from Dar, and we had a pretty nice couple of days. It’s always good to explore a new place. We drove there on Wednesday, spent Thursday in the city and Friday on the beach, and came back Saturday. Of course, there’s a little more than that to the story.

Dar is pretty much directly east of Iringa, on the coast of Tanzania. It takes about 8 hours to get there, driving. Maria (the P1 teacher), Sara (the Preschool teacher) and I had planned on taking a bus to get there, but at the last minute the P5 teacher, Hugh, decided to come – and he has a car! So we happily tossed our bus tickets in favor of a more comfortable ride, in more ways than one. Basically, we just drove all day. There was no way to get lost because there is one and only one road that goes to Dar from Iringa, so we left at about 8 AM and arrived in the city at about 4:30.

The middle of the city of Dar is crowded, hectic, dusty, and a haven for pickpockets. But just to the north and to the south of the City Centre (they spell it that way so I guess I will too), once you get out of the business areas, there are some beautiful beaches. Like I said, it’s on the coast, and a lot of tourists come to Dar to visit the beaches. Of course, there are resorts set up in both directions. The northern beaches are slightly more touristy and expensive, according to Maria (who used to live and work in Dar), so we opted for the southern region.

To get to the southern beaches, you have to take a ferry across a bay that comes into Dar. To get to the ferry, you have to drive through Dar. So we didn’t get onto the ferry until about 5:30, but the ferry ride itself is only about 5 minutes and from there the drive to our resort of choice, the Sunrise Beach Resort, was another 10-15 minutes.

Now, this ferry is not a touristy, fun ferry. This is the ferry that thousands of Tanzanians use every day to go back and forth, and it's for both cars and people. There are multiple decks, and once it docks minor pandemonium reigns, as cars from the lower level and people from the upper levels (and lower levels, sandwiched between cars) jockey to get off the ferry first. You'd think there was some sort of prize involved. Here's a picture of the offloading:

As soon as you get out the City Centre, the change in the atmosphere is immediate. It’s breezier, calmer…the attributes you think of when beaches come to mind. We were excited when we got to the resort because it wasn’t that crowded. Wednesday actually was a national holiday in Tanzania, Nyerere Day (in honor of the first president of the Republic of Tanzania), but we got there on Wednesday evening so pretty much everyone had work the next day. The beach was really nice, of course:

Upon checking in at reception, we had our first battle with the receptionist who was unlucky enough to have to deal with us and our obstinate unwillingness to pay additional/unspecified extra fees. His name was Jumanne, which means Tuesday in Kiswahili.

Side note: most people refer to the Swahili language as “Swahili,” when in the language itself it is called “Kiswahili.” The prefix “Ki-” attached to a place/people indicates that the word refers to the language of that entity. For instance, England is “Ingereza” while English is “Kiingereza.” China is, well, “China,” and Chinese is “Kichina.” In a slight variation, Spain is “Spain,” but Spanish is “Kispanish.” You get the point. You may ask: why, then, is Kiswahili not called “Kitanzania” or “Kikenya”? The answer is that Kiswahili predates the modern countries of East Africa, and originated with the Swahili tribe of people that settled here. So Kiswahili means “the language of the Swahili people,” really…and the word “Swahili” is derived from the Arabic words meaning “coast people.” As the Swahili people separated and underwent a diaspora along the eastern coast of Africa, dialects and local variations of Kiswahili emerged, so that the Kiswahili you hear in Kenya is not the Kiswahili you hear in Tanzania, is not the Kiswahili you hear in Malawi, etc. It’s not uniform within countries either, of course, just like any other language spoken over a large area. Anyway, the point is, when I talk about the Swahili language I will call it Kiswahili. And that’s your etymological lesson for the day.

Returning to our first conversation with Jumanne: we told him we had a reservation for 2 nights, Wednesday and Thursday, in one of the resort’s Executive Rooms. We were planning on moving to a different room on Friday night because the room rates change for the weekend. When we had called to reserve our room on Monday, we had initially planned on booking a Standard Room, but we asked the woman who answered our call some questions about the room sizes, etc., and she said a Standard Room wasn’t big enough for 3 people. However, she said, the Executive Room was, and on weeknights, Monday through Thursday, the room rates are half price. So we could get an Executive Room for Tsh 50,000/night – at about Tsh 1300/US $1, about $40/night split between 3 of us. Pretty good! So we told the woman on the phone that we’d take an Executive Room for Wednesday and Thursday nights, and change to a different room on Friday and we’d figure that out when we were at the resort.

Jumanne had a different idea, though. He told us that since Wednesday was a national holiday, the discounted weeknight rate didn’t apply, so we’d have to pay the full price for the room on Wednesday and we could get the discounted rate only on Thursday. Of course, we were in no mood to fork over an extra 50,000 shillings, so we just said no. We had made our reservation with the understanding of a lower rate, and that’s what we were going to pay. He repeated what he had said before about it being a national holiday, then changed tacks and said it wasn’t his rule, he would get in trouble with the resort GM. So we told him we wanted to speak with the GM, because this misunderstanding between employees was not our fault. Then he gave us a line about the GM being very busy – and, well, here’s a rundown of the dialogue:

------------------------------

Jumanne: I’m sorry, the manager is very busy and he cannot come here.

Maria: Well, we can go to him. Where is he? I’ve been sitting all day, I’m ready to walk. Just tell me where he is and I will go to him.

Jumanne: No, no, I cannot do that. But you see, this rate is the standard rate and it cannot change.

Elizabeth: But that’s not the rate we were told on the phone. We made this reservation based on the price that we were told. This is not our fault, so you need to honor the price that we were given.

Jumanne: No, no, I cannot do that. The woman who answered the phone, she is new and she did not know the information, what I am telling you is what you should pay.

Maria: That’s your problem, not ours. I would like to speak to your manager. Can you call him, please? This is very bad customer service.

Jumanne: Yeah, yeah, OK, I can call him.

[he calls the GM, exchanges a few words and comes back]

Jumanne: He says he cannot come here, but that you must pay the full room rate because it is a national holiday so the discount does not apply.

Elizabeth: He needs to come here and tell us that himself.

Maria: Yes, let us explain what happened to him. We can still go to him, where is he? Just tell us where he is.

Elizabeth: We can ask someone else where he is.

Maria: Yeah, if you’re afraid to…

Jumanne: No, no, I am not afraid-

Elizabeth: Then where is he?

Jumanne: He is with other customers, he is very busy.

Maria: We can wait! We can wait right here, and you just call and let him know that when he’s done we’re waiting for him. We won’t move.

Jumanne: Yeah, yeah, OK, you can wait here.

[we move to the benches near the reception window, Jumanne gets on the phone with someone else]

Jumanne: OK, someone is coming.

[tall, skinny guy holding a walkie-talkie who turns out to be the Assistant Manager and somehow wearing a sweater vest in tropical weather approaches, holds a muttered conversation with Jumanne without even directly addressing us. This does not make us more likely to acquiesce to the resort’s pressure. The guy leaves and we walk back up to the window.]

Jumanne: OK, now he is saying that because this is a misunderstanding we can offer you a 15% discount off the regular room rate. That is what we can do.

Maria: That’s not 50,000 shillings. That’s not good enough.

[Maria and I have a not-so-hushed conversation about leaving and finding another place to stay]

Maria: I still want to speak to your manager. He needs to come talk to us, and tell us himself what the problem is. It’s not our fault that your employee did not know the right information. Can you call him, please?

Jumanne: He is very busy, he is busy with other customers.

Maria: Well, we are customers too.

Jumanne (resignedly): OK, I’ll call him again.

[Jumanne gets back on the phone, talks with the GM and comes back]

Jumanne: OK, the manager has accepted your rate for tonight and tomorrow night.

--------------------------

Success! Maria did a great job of staying tough, and I think because she’s Tanzanian but speaks awesome English she intimidates Tanzanian workers sometimes. Certainly played in our favor on Wednesday. So we paid Tsh 100,000 for 2 nights and went to our Executive Room, while Hugh (who had stuck around to see the conclusion of the debate) headed back into the city to stay at his hotel of choice in Dar. The only other excitement of the night was having dinner at the resort restaurant, which had quite an extensive menu and wasn’t too badly overpriced. Planning on heading into the city after breakfast the next day, we turned in fairly early, satisfied at having emerged victorious in our price negotiations – which doesn’t happen very often here!

Bonus: since there weren't many pictures to illustrate the first day of the Dar trip, here are some pictures from a hike I went on a couple weekends ago with Sara and Anne. We went up to the top of one of the many giant hills with tons of rocks on it around here, and there was a little chapel at the top. There were great views all around. Here are Anne and Sara:

The view from the chapel to the neighboring hill:

The chapel itself:

And two shots of the view. We were pretty high up!

Next post: the rest of our time in Dar.

Brief Update - To Be Followed by More

My apologies for not having posted anything in nearly a month - not that nothing blog-worthy has happened, I've just been trying to conserve internet bandwidth. I tried to post a video this afternoon, but for some reason it didn't work AND it ate nearly a gig of bandwidth so I'll need to figure out a better way to do that.

So I'll wait to do a longer post for a few more days, so I can get more internet recharge cards. And I'll have more interesting stuff to write about, since 3 other teachers and I are heading to Dar es Salaam (henceforth called simply "Dar") for a couple of days to explore and relax. There are some nice beaches both to the north and the south of Dar, and we booked an "executive room" for 2 nights (half price on weeknights!) so that should be cool. At any rate, sorry for the delay, and just for fun here's a picture of the gardener at IIS mowing the grass on the football pitch:

And by mowing, I mean swinging a machete back and forth to achieve the desired results. The man works hard.

Birthday Safari!

I know I haven’t done a post about IIS (my school) yet, but what I did last weekend definitely takes precedence. I went on my first African safari, and it was SO cool.

Last Friday was my birthday, and at school the kids all wished me happy birthday and my flatmate Adam made a ridiculous hat out of paper, with a big redwood tree sticking up in the middle (for Stanford), for me to wear all day. After school, we went to a store in town called Neema Crafts:

It’s a store/café run by a pair of British expats – in the back is a workplace, and they take in disabled Tanzanians and give them jobs working at the store or making crafts to sell. It’s basically an expat hangout, and when you go you see a lot of Brits, Americans, Italians, and whoever else is in the area. I’m pretty sure there are a few Koreans here too, but since all I know how to say is hello and can’t follow up I’m going to leave them alone. Anyway, we met up with some British friends we’ve made who live near IIS: Ann, Dave, Rob, and Elena. They wished me a happy birthday as well and we hung out for a while, and planned for our safari the next day. Earlier in the week, they had invited Adam and me to take a weekend trip with them to Ruaha National Park, which is about 3 hours southwest of Iringa and the largest national park (not game reserve) in Africa. It was recently expanded to cover about 24,000 kilometers of land. They had found a reliable guide who had a safari vehicle with 6 seats, so of course we said we wanted to go! We would leave Saturday morning and return Sunday afternoon.

Let me say at the outset that I was pretty excited to go on a real safari, but I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, having never been on one. I didn’t know if we were really going to get to do the real thing, or if it was going to be some watered-down touristy/wuss version where the animals are fenced in and tourists just drive up to the gate and do stupid things like poke sticks at them and take pictures with the flash on their cameras. I didn’t want the latter, of course. And so when on Saturday morning, the 4 of them and our guide came by the flat to pick us up and I saw our car, I got pretty pumped. Our guide, David, was very nice and has an awesome jeep for safaris:

The guy in the picture is Rob, an orthopedist from England who's been here for about 3 months working at a clinic. The jeep had metal reinforcements around it, and the panels on the top lifted off so that we could stand on the seats (or the floor) and look for wildlife out of the top of the car:

We were in for the real thing – no getting out of the car in case lions are nearby, roaming the grassland to search for animals. Yes!! We packed in our stuff, mostly tons of water and some food for the next few meals, and drove off to the park. We arrived around 12:30 and were hit immediately by more heat than we’ve gotten in Iringa since we came in August: we were in serious savanna, the real habitat of wild African animals. Here’s what most of the landscape looked like:

We were allowed 24 hours in the park (you pay by the day), and started making use of our time almost immediately – David took the panels off of the roof and put up the sunshade, and we stood up and drove into the park. We hadn’t been inside for more than 20 minutes when we came across some impalas and a tiny little dikdik – and then no sooner had we passed those than we saw a little family of elephants on the side of the road!

They were just hanging out, and we stopped and gawked for a little while then drove on.

We stopped for a bit and got out of the car at the Hippo and Crocodile Pool, which certainly lives up to its name. Right now it’s the dry season, but the Ruaha River flows through the park and that’s where most of the animals spend the hot hours of the day: either in the river or in the shade of the trees along its banks. So we saw a few crocs, and a ton (literally, I’m sure) of hippos:

It’s hard to see, but the 4 dark blobs in the area with dead grass are hippos. Also occupying the area were some red-billed storks, a couple warthogs, and a fish eagle, which is a serious bird of prey. That thing looked like it could take your eyes out in a second.

Moving on from the Hippo Pool, we got back in the car and drove toward where we would be staying during the night, the park bandas. Along the way, I got my first view of kudu, big antelope with comically large ears:

In Kiswahili, “banda” means shed or outdoor building. It’s where tourists who want to stay directly in the park want to go, and it’s an amazing place to see wildlife because it’s situated right on the river and so you can just sit outside and watch impalas, baboons, elephants, giraffes, birds, and more go about their daily business. Here’s the view of the riverbed from the edge of the banda area:

You can kind of see the baboons and impalas that were in the area. And here’s what a banda looked like – a round tin can with 2 beds, but certainly a decent place to get some shuteye between excursions.

I shared a banda with Ann, who I’ve also gone running with a few times in the last couple weeks. Here she is in front of our safari jeep:

Adam and Dave shared another, and Rob and Elena, an engaged couple, shared a third. After putting our stuff away, putting on major amounts of sunscreen, and eating some lunch, we piled back into the jeep and headed off on our afternoon/evening animal search at about 3:30. There were 3 of us in the backseat and 3 in the middle row, with our torsos and heads sticking up out of the jeep straining our eyes (we shared 2 pairs of binoculars between us as well) for movement in the grass and on the plains. Here’s what we looked like:

It was actually quite comfortable, I thought, just somewhat dusty. Some of the others were pretty knackered (as the Brits say) by the heat, but when we were driving there was a decent wind coming through that kept things bearable. And I must say, compared to the Melbourne heat wave I experienced in January of this year, last weekend was almost mild. The roads aren’t that great, of course, so we got jostled around a fair bit (I now have a couple of bruises around my ribs – a minuscule price to pay), but the landscape and scenery were so amazing and the amount of wildlife we saw was so impressive that I would have gladly taken more punishment than that.

Since it was still the hot part of the day, the best place to see animals was along the river. So we did a drive down part of the riverbank, which was a pretty excellent decision. In the shade of a big tree, we spotted TEN lions napping and relaxing! We were content to stay about 40 meters away, but our guide decided we should get a better look and nosed the jeep in toward the tree until we all urged him to stop, no more than 10 meters from them. They looked pretty unbothered, though, as you can see here:

Of the 10, 2 or 3 were adults and the rest were still young lions – almost grown, but not quite. It was almost surreal to see them in their natural habitat, with no fences, no signs with their scientific name, no souvenir vendors in sight. Of course, this is much better and truly spectacular. We checked in on the lions on our way back to camp, and they were even less impressed with our appearance:

Moving on from the lions, we also got unbelievably close to a group of elephants (don’t think there were enough of them to call it a herd), who instinctively circled around their young when they smelled us:

Here’s a closer shot of the elephants, including the babies, moving away:

We saw impalas everywhere:

And some more dikdiks, and more giraffes than I could count:

There were birds everywhere – guinea fowl, vultures, eagles, hawks, hornbills, and starlings, which have brilliant blue plumage on the underside of their wings and on their chests. Very cool to watch in flight. We saw some birds dive-bombing fish in the river, but of course I wasn’t quick enough to catch it on film. There was also a crocodile by the river, just slipping into the water. I’ve seen crocodiles going into water before, of course, but something about being in these animals’ habitat, rather than viewing them in an artificial one, made everything more interesting and exciting.

Along the river, the trees were also chock full of vervet monkeys:

At one part of the road, the guide said we could sit on the front of the car if we wanted, since it was shaded by trees and there were no rangers around. So Adam and I hopped up to the front and enjoyed a completely unhindered view of what was around. Here we are:

In that area we saw a big old bull elephant on his own:

Just before we came back into camp, we came across a big group of mongeese (or mongooses, which I think sounds silly) running somewhere:

I know it’s not clear, but all the little brown spots are mongeese. More mongeese than I’ve ever seen in my life.

We headed back to camp around 6:30, and got back in time to watch the end of the sunset on the riverbed – with all the animals washing and playing in the water, including a herd of elephants.

It was a very Lion King/Circle of Life view, and I actually couldn’t get than song out of my head all day. We relaxed at one of the tables near the river, while Rob, Dave, and Adam kindly made dinner from dried pasta and fresh sauce that Dave and I had purchased the day before at a Catholic nun-run shop in Gangilonga. They also surprised me after dinner with a birthday cake, which was really nice. We turned in around 11 so we’d be able to get up for sunrise the next day, to get every minute we could out of our 24 hours in the park. We actually tried to go back to our banda at about 10:30, but couldn’t because there were elephants crashing along all around it! They were walking back from the riverbed to their sleeping place, and I guess through the banda area was the most direct route. It was pretty amazing to see elephants not more than 20 feet from us, just trundling back to their home base. In the morning, you could see the damage they had done:

So we were up at 6 AM and in the jeep by 6:20, jolting off on another game road to see what we could see. Another lion in the distance and loads of giraffes. Here’s one where I got a good look at the little birds that perch on giraffes, that you learn about in every biology lesson on symbiosis:

And one giraffe with its baby:

We saw some beautiful birds, including this one:

And more vultures, though we couldn’t find a kill nearby:

Some rock outcroppings loaded with rock hyraxes, some zebras along the road:

And along the riverbed, a group of warthogs!

We drove around for a little while longer searching for leopards or buffalo, pretty much the only 2 animals we hadn't seen in the park, but were unsuccessful. We headed back to the bandas around 11:30, packed our stuff, and our guide David put the pedal to the metal to get us out of the gate by 12:30 so we wouldn't have to pay for another 24 hours in the park. We just made it, and on the way back to Iringa we stopped at the home of one of the IIS families, a Greek family that owns a tobacco farm. They have 3 boys, one is a student of mine (who you will come to like immensely once I do my post about my students) and another is a student of Adam's. So we visited with them for a while, then headed back. We arrived back in Iringa around 5 and thanked our guide profusely. We'll probably contact him when we want to go back to Ruaha after the rains come, or when we go to other parks around Iringa. It was a great trip and definitely made for one of the best birthdays ever!