The Flying Panda Chronicles

A Few Random Thoughts

2010-09-23T11:03:00.003+07:00

1. American cops : donuts :: Peruvian policia : churros.

2. Under the impression that only large vehicles with 18 wheels or more give a warning sound when going in reverse? Think again. Here in Peru, the taxis (which are everywhere) emit a strange tune that sounds like it came from the very first generation of cell phones to advise nearby cars and passersby that they're reversing. I wish I could record the sound and post it here, but the best I can do is describe it. It sounds like rejected hero theme music from a Nintendo Entertainment System, and I do mean the original NES. It has that electronic, buzzing, one-pitchy-note-at-a-time quality that old video game music does. And it goes on for a long time! You think the tune is going to repeat, but it launches into a second movement.

3. French fries (papas fritas, I should say) : Peruvian meals :: rice : Asian meals. You can't escape it, and when you request 1/4 chicken to go without the fries they look at you like you asked for 1/4 moose with horns or something.

4. This is how I deal with teaching little kids who can't reach the top of the whiteboard.

I Miss Hard Courts

2010-09-13T08:53:00.002+07:00

In the last couple of weeks, my level of respect for the following tennis players has risen dramatically: Roger Federer (I didn't think it was possible to respect him more, but hey), Andre Agassi, Michael Chang, Jim Courier, Mats Wilander, Bjorn Borg, Yevgeny Kafelnikov, Ivan Lendl, Chris Evert, Martina Navratilova, Monica Seles, Jennifer Capriati, Serena Williams, and Steffi Graf. If you can tell me what all of these amazing players have in common before you read the next paragraph, I will fly you down to Peru myself and pay for your surfing lessons.

All of the aforementioned players have won the French Open, which is held on clay courts. Of course, these are not the only people who have won. But they're the ones that I know for sure who did not grow up playing on clay, meaning that at some point they had to learn how to adjust their game to win at the French. And let me tell you, having recently begun to play regularly on a clay court, that is WAY easier said than done.

I also have way more sympathy for Pete Sampras, John McEnroe, and - we'll throw Andy Roddick in there too, I guess, and other great players who weren't quite able to take home the Coupe des Mosquetaires. The court just plays way differently from a hard court or a grass court, and I'm constantly reminding myself of the adjustments I have to make.

So the upshot of this post is that, after over 2 years of very sparse opportunities for playing tennis, I again am able to play regularly! The first week I was here, one of the trainers who works at the gym I joined told me there was a country club with courts in a particular area of Trujillo. So I walked over and inquired about using the facilities, and was told that I'd need to join the club (for the price of a trip to Antarctica, basically) or be invited by a member to play. But luck was on my side, because at the moment I was leaving a member with tennis rackets walked in and told me that there was a public court in a different area of Trujillo, and that the club pro could take me there. And then even more luck was on my side, because at that moment the club pro walked out of a doorway and started to leave! So I introduced myself and walked with him to the public courts. They're a 35-minute walk from my house, or an 8-minute taxi ride. Here they are:

There are two, one of red clay and the other of some gray gravel-like substance of unknown origin. I play on the red one because, according to the pro, it's better. I believe him.

Here the pro's son is repainting the lines on the court. He says they have to do that at least 3 times a day.

The courts are part of a "sports complex" across the street from a middle/high school. So there's a basketball court, an area where people play soccer, and a little track (about 300 meters, by my best estimate) around the whole thing.

I got the pro's information, to schedule a time to play when I could, and went away feeling very successful. I didn't have any time to play until the very end of August, but in the last couple of weeks I've gotten to hit fairly often, maybe 3-4 times a week, so I feel like I'm starting to get into a rhythm again. The clay has made it slightly difficult to do that.

Here, now, are the reasons why clay courts are different from hard courts:

1. The ball doesn't take a reliable bounce - depending on where it lands in the court and how the clay is settled, it can follow the trajectory it had before it hit the court, or it can just hit the court and die, or it can bounce over your head, or it can zoom off perpendicular to where you are. The last three options, which occur with surprising frequency, leave you to whiff and attempt not to look totally dumb for having slashed at air.

2. The corollary to #1: because you always have to be wary of wacky bounces, you have to make tons of last-second adjustments to get in position to hit the ball. You might get by sometimes with lazy footwork on hard courts, but you will bite the dust (literally) if you don't keep your feet moving on clay.

3. If you've ever watched tennis commentary on ESPN, you've heard this one a thousand times: the ball "takes more spin" on clay than on any other surface. So if you give it a good slice, it'll hit the court and skim along barely off the surface. Go for topspin, and you can see why Nadal's forehand would be so devastating. I mean, I can even see topspin when I hit the ball! (Note: If you've ever played with me, you know I hit a pretty flat ball). So you just have to be ready to respond to some fairly extreme spins.

4. This one, even more than the wacky bounces, is giving me fits: the movement is simply not the same. I haven't learned how to slide yet, which puts me at a pretty big disadvantage for playing on clay, and multiple times I've pretty much just gotten stuck when trying to change direction because the action of pushing off is trickier. You have clay moving under your feet as you run, so you just feel a little slower and it's harder to set up for a shot on the run.

But regardless of these complications in my return to tennis, it's still one of the things that I enjoy doing most and I love that I'm getting back into the routine. And it's going to feel pretty good when I'm running around like a real clay-courter!

Trujillo, Peru: Where Modernity and History Go Head-to-Head

2010-08-25T00:22:00.008+07:00

I've been in Peru for just over a month now, and I'm keeping pretty busy! I'm staying in the city of Trujillo, which is on the northern coast and is the 2nd or 3rd biggest city in Peru, depending on who you ask. Trujillo's nickname is "La Ciudad de la Eterna Primavera," or The City of Eternal Spring. I have to say, given the weather this past month, I don't entirely buy that description. It was fairly chilly here, especially at night, but it's getting milder so I'm getting happier.

I should probably explain what I'm doing here: I signed on to be the Program Coordinator for Espaanglisch, a small nonprofit in Trujillo that brings foreign volunteers to teach English classes to adults and children who can't afford schooling. Education in Peru is not free, at any level, so there are a lot of people living in poor neighborhoods who don't attend school. There are a few NGOs working in Trujillo that run free schools in poor neighborhoods, but the government is really doing absolutely nothing about this problem. I have to say, this really hacks me off: I mean, how do you expect a nation to pull itself out of poverty if the people can't become more educated and the government isn't working on it? And all the Peruvians I've talked to have so little faith in the government (I think all but one have used the word "corrupt") that the problem will be even more difficult to fix. More and more Peruvians are relying on private institutions for schooling because the "public" schools are just worthless...this, of course, makes the correlation between wealth and education even stronger and makes educational equity even more difficult to attain.

Anyway, so I'm here to work for Espaanglisch. It's a small program, with only 2 or 3 volunteers a month, but there's still work to do! We currently offer two classes in the evening, 3 nights/week. One class is an English Conversation Class and the other is a Basic English class for teenagers who live in a really impoverished area. The classes are free for youth and for volunteers from our partner organizations. Other people who just want to practice speaking English can come to the Conversation Class, and they pay a really minimal fee that helps us with program costs. In addition to the evening classes, we partner with an organization called SKIP (Supporting Kids in Peru) that goes into public schools in the mornings and teaches English, and also holds English classes in the afternoons at their site in a barrio called El Porvenir. So our volunteers can co-teach SKIP English classes in the mornings/afternoons. Our final program offering is at a free primary school run by an NGO called USDA (Una Sonrisa de Amor), where our volunteers will begin teaching English classes 2 mornings a week to the children there. This is a new partnership that I've established since I've gotten here, so I've been doing the legwork and laying the foundation for our volunteers.

Now, this Program Coordinator position is a volunteer position, so I'm not getting paid anything. My accommodation and utilities are being covered, which is pretty nice since I have my own room and the house has internet. But being the cheapskate that I have become since living in places with extremely low costs of living, I decided to find some paid teaching work on the side to help me cover my living expenses. To that end, I very quickly got a weekend teaching job at El Instituto Cultural, a nearby English language institute with the best reputation in Trujillo. It's a pretty fair amount of work, though, because I teach for 4 hours on Saturdays and 3 1/2 on Sundays and I'm still sort of figuring things out since I got the most cursory teacher orientation ever (here's your classroom, here's how to turn on the computer, don't wear jeans to class).

I also got a gig through a friend of the previous Program Coordinator. This friend runs a private English teaching business, and his teachers go to various locations in Trujillo (mostly companies) and do small classes, generally with business English. So last week I started teaching an English class at the APR Energy Plant in the La Esperanza neighborhood of Trujillo, 3 afternoons a week for 1 1/2 hours each afternoon. I actually enjoy this class because the students are adults and are super motivated to learn.

Oh, and did I mention that I'm also teaching the Basic English class this month, since we only have one volunteer (a total fluke), as well as an evening tutoring session for another student? So my schedule for August has been pretty insane:

Mondays - teaching 3-4:30 PM (private) and 7-9:15 PM (Espaanglisch)

Tuesdays - my only free day, why do you think I'm updating my blog today?

Wednesdays - teaching 8 AM-12:30 PM (USDA), 3-4:30 PM (private), 7-9:15 PM (Espaanglisch)

Thursdays - work with USDA on some of their other projects, 2:15-5:30 PM and 7-9:30 PM

Fridays - teaching 8 AM - 11:30 AM (USDA), 3-4:30 PM (private), 7-8:15 PM (Espaanglisch), volunteer work with USDA 8:30 - 11:30 PM

Saturdays - teaching 4-8 PM (El Instituto Cultural)

Sundays - teaching 9 AM - 12:30 PM (El Instituto Cultural)

Whew. Fortunately, I only have one more week of this and then our September volunteers arrive. Once they do, I can knock the USDA and Espaanglisch teaching off my schedule. Last detail/explanation item: I signed on to be Program Coordinator for 6 months, and I started at the end of July. So I'll be leaving at the end of January/beginning of February and coming back to the States. And if anyone has a month or two to spare and feels like coming down to Peru, just let me know if you feel like doing some volunteer teaching while you're at it!

So here are some pictures of Trujillo. At the center of town, as in most South American cities, is the Plaza de Armas:

The plaza is bordered by colonial-style buildings which look like they should be old restaurants or post offices; but in fact, they're offices for businesses such as American Airlines.

At the end of July, Peru celebrated its Independence Day (July 28th). To celebrate, Inca Kola (the omnipresent soft drink here, it tastes like bubble gum and looks like radioactive runoff) held a concert and "Night of Peruvian Food" in and around the Plaza. I have never seen so many South Americans in the same place at the same time. Even the areas around the food stalls were jammed:

In general, I must say that I find Peruvians to be very nice, friendly people. But there was about as much pushing as you might expect at such an absurd, corporate-generated event.

And of course, there was the obligatory enormous inflatable Inca Kola bottle:

There were also a fair number of entertainers in the crowd who looked like they jumped right out of Saturday night Latin American television, like this guy:

Also to celebrate Independence Day, members of the army were dispatched to public locations such as the mall (where I joined a very nice gym) to sit around on their horses and look official.

It worked, I guess, because people were standing around and gawking. It was all very ceremonious until one horse decided it wanted to sit down:

The soldier tried to play it off like he meant for the horse to lie down, but it was totally obvious that he was taken aback by the move. There was also a little military band in the plaza in front of the mall.

And now, a few comments about foods I've tried so far. First, I have to include a shot of Inca Kola since it's freaking everywhere. In some restaurants, it's the only beverage available. No water, no other soft drinks...just bright yellow liquid gum.

I also saw this drink in a grocery store: Peru Cola. This in itself isn't so odd, even if it is strawberry-flavored, but what is odd is that below the word Cola on the label, it states, "Bebida con Fibra Soluble": drink with soluble fiber. What kind of soft drink has soluble fiber?

I've also gotten to try rabbit, I believe for the first time. I went to Huanchaco, a nearby seaside town (more about Huanchaco in a later post), and had lunch at the home of a very nice lady who rents rooms to our volunteers sometimes. She cooked a whole rabbit:

Including the head:

And then did an impressive job of breaking it down:

It was pretty good - well-cooked, not gamy, and it had a distinct flavor. It didn't taste like beef or chicken or duck or any other meat.

I also had guinea pig, or cuy, for the second time last week. The first time I had it was 3 years ago, when I was in Cusco. Here's a picture from that 2007 meal:

And here's a shot of the home-cooked cuy that I had last week.

I live in a house with the founder of Espaanglisch, David, and his aunt Carmen. Carmen is the landlady/owner, and she has a little guinea pig enclosure just off the kitchen. So last week we had one for dinner. The first time I had it, I thought it tasted like chicken. This time I must concur with Carmen, who maintains that it has its own distinct flavor as well. Apparently, the meat Peruvians like best is that of the guinea pig, but they're so small that most people eat chicken most of the time since they're larger easier to eat. I believe this, since on every street block there are at least 2 restaurants selling chicken. Generally it's pollo a la brasa, roasted over a fire:

And it's always served with fries and "repollo," a little salad with iceberg lettuce so white it's basically crunchy water.

One final observation for this post: as my title indicates, I've been struck by the clear and somewhat incongruous juxtaposition of ancient, even prehistoric features to very modern ones in this city. The corporations headquartered in colonial buildings; the military cavalry outside the mall; the casino (there are a TON) and the Radio Shack that are right next to a store selling handmade weavings and crafts:

The street artist in the old park, moving to music from an mp3:

And, of course, the extreme poverty and lack of educational opportunities just a few minutes away from people who have money to burn at casinos or country clubs. I think that maybe I'm seeing this difference very starkly now because the city of Trujillo is much larger than either of the places I've lived in the last 2 years, and elements of its Peruvian history are so present and so different from the attempts at development that are going on.

I'm sure I'll raise this issue again in future posts, but that's all for now. Time to spend part of my free day doing something else!

A Week in New York: Or, I Am So Sick of That Jay-Z/Alicia Keys Song

2010-07-25T21:02:00.000+07:00

When I left Tanzania at the end of June, I flew to New York so that I could be part of my college roommate’s wedding on July 2. The day before the wedding, Siobhan (my friend and the other bridesmaid) and I were taken to the Indian part of north Jersey and we got henna (called mandee in Hindi) on our hands. Here's a picture of my hands as I waited for the dye to dry so I could brush it off:

And here's what it looked like after it darkened a bit. I like how this photo also shows off my watch tan:

It was a (very) abbreviated version of a Hindu wedding, so I wore a saree (all the Indians I know spell it with 2 “e”s rather than an “i”) and helped tie a necklace onto the bride. It was really nice to catch up with a couple of my best friends from college, and it was a fun wedding as well. Here are a few pictures, courtesy of the mother of the groom.

So congratulations to Vidya and Steve!

After the wedding, I stayed in New York for a couple more days just to get to know the city a little better. Big thanks to my friends Sara and Johnny, who live in NYC, gave me lots of good directions and information, and found me a very nice place to stay.

I took the subway many times – it’s pretty efficient, but not that cheap. However, I experienced a bit of sticker shock with pretty much every price I saw in NYC, from bottles of water to cab rides. The best price I got was on a pair of pants I bought at the Gap in Times Square. Anyway, I saw Times Square and Rockefeller Plaza. Siobhan located the original Saks Fifth Avenue store, so I took a picture in front of it because my mom is always telling me how great the store is. But I still didn't go in.

I went to the American Museum of Natural History (exhaustingly large) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (masterpiece overload!), spending pretty much an entire day in each. I went running in Central Park, which is a great place to walk through and hang out.

I even got to watch some pretty good tennis one evening when I went to a World TeamTennis match, featuring the New York Sportimes playing the Washington Kastles.

Now, I like tennis far more than the next person, I’d say, but I’m not a fan of team names that are made-up words or intentionally misspelled real words. Also, the Sportimes mascot was a giant fuzzy tennis ball named Tennis the Menace who looked a lot like the Capital City Goofball, only green. I forgot to take a picture.

In club tennis at Stanford, we played with the WTT format, but it wasn’t exactly the same. The most notable player in the match was Leander Paes, who was playing for the Kastles:

The Kastles also had Rennae Stubbs and Murphy Jensen (he was their coach), so they were by far the more accomplished team when it came to doubles play. And yet they lost the mixed doubles set and the men’s doubles set! Paes really had an off day, but considering he had won the Wimbledon mixed doubles title 2 days prior to the match he had a pretty good excuse.

By far, the most exciting event I watched happened on July 4^th. No, it wasn’t fireworks; it wasn’t a parade; it wasn’t anything like that. I made sure to get myself over to Coney Island to watch the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest, featuring defending champion Joey Chesnut. I got there about 2 ½ hours early, and still had to wriggle my way into a spot where I court sort of see the action. The MC who made the introductions was pretty hilarious, and said all sorts of mock-serious things like, “None of us will leave here the same person…we will be transformed by what we witness!” Here are some pictures from my vantage point - first, a shot of the massive sign just to my left of the stage, featuring a countdown clock, enormous pictures of people cramming hot dogs in their mouths, and hot dog eating world records.

Very near me, the good people of Pepto Bismol had set up shop. They were an official sponsor of the event, and were giving away Pepto thunder sticks to anyone and everyone.

And here's one of two hot dog mascots, dancing onstage before the contest.

Finally, the contest itself:

I didn’t even see when the police came and got Kobayashi when he tried to get on the stage – I saw a bunch of police, but I couldn’t see exactly what was happening. I think it’s pretty ridiculous that he wasn’t allowed to compete anyway, because he didn’t sign a contract with Major League Eating. I mean, really??? That’s just absurd. The guy’s won the thing like 6 times and he doesn’t get to participate because he refuses to be affiliated with a certain organization? Ridiculous.

I also like this picture, of a Nathan's employee who's super-pumped about his role cleaning up after the carnage:

So those are some of the highlights of my trip to New York. I flew back to Fort Worth on July 7^th and spent a couple weeks relaxing at home before leaving for Peru on the 20^th. I’ll put all the details about Peru in my next post!

Kwa Heri, Tanzania

2010-07-22T22:45:00.001+07:00

"Kwa heri" is a goodbye in Kiswahili that literally means "for happiness." The more informal way of saying goodbye is to say the translation of "see you later," "see you tomorrow," or something like that. But I like the way that kwa heri sounds.

I left Tanzania 3 weeks ago, so to do a bit of a wrapup here are some of the last pictures I took in Iringa, organized by topic rather than strictly chronologically:

Class Pets: In May, a couple of students found a very young mouse, or a "pinky" as it's apparently called. The majority of the class decided that they wanted to keep it as a class pet. They named it Dudu, which means "insect" in Kiswahili.

A couple kids even made a playhouse for him.

Unfortunately, the mouse was simply too young to survive without its mother and died about 5 days into our care for it. We made a shallow grave and a couple of students mourned Dudu's passing.

The next week, a student informed the class that if we still wanted a pet, her father could get us hamsters. After much debate and an attempt by me to explain why some mammalian species have lots of babies and others don't, the students again agreed to give it a shot. So one day the student comes in with these:

These, obviously, are not hamsters. They are full grown guinea pigs, which are about 8 times the size of hamsters. Yeesh. And one was pregnant. The girls wanted to name the adults Romeo and Juliet, but the boys nixed Romeo and went with Flicko instead.

Then the female had 2 kids, and the students simply could not agree on names. Some of the boys wanted to call them Manfred and Gustav, after a pair of twins at the school, but it was left up to Chloe, the student who would take them home.

I was really surprised at how these babies looked. Having seen rat and mouse babies, I expected them to resemble their order of mammals: hairless, pink, closed-eyed. But no! The babies, as soon as they came out, were fully furred, had wide open eyes, and even started eating a little bit of tomato.

Seriously, what kinds of rodents are these?!? They're sort of picky eaters as well.

All of the guinea pigs have survived to date, and are being cared for in the indefinite future by one of the students.

Key Stage 2 Exams: I have no pictures of these, but my students finally took these exams in English and Math at the end of May. We prepared for them big time, and so I finally understand why teachers are so annoyed with having to prep students for standardized tests...especially when the tests aren't entirely relevant to the student group (in this case, the exams are British). But they're done, and all but a few students passed - including a couple who I worked with a lot this year. I'm pretty happy with the results.

Service Day: Right after the Key Stage exams, the Community Service Club organized a Service Day in which every student from P1 up participated in a service activity. Sara, the club teacher, found 8 or 9 projects for students and it was a pretty great event, especially for the first go. I was in charge of Trash Pickup, having done it with Senior PE a few times this year. This time it was just for primary students. Most of them did a really good job! We made spears from stakes and nails, to make it more interesting, and those worked to a certain degree.

First we walked and collected trash.

The little P1s really went for it!

Then we sorted out the plastic bottles to be recycled.

Presentation of Learning: yes, I ripped this name off from Summerbridge (I mean Breakthrough). Most of my students have no fear of performance, and in fact crave attention, so when I proposed to them that we hold a day of various activities so they could show what they've learned, they jumped at the chance. So we invited the parents, I made as much Egyptian food as I possibly could to celebrate the end of our unit on Ancient Egypt, and we had a morning of multi-disciplinary activities. The students delivered their well-researched presentations on an aspect of Ancient Egyptian culture, we played Math Jeopardy!, did a running dictation, and I had them try the egg-drop project as a science activity. Here are some pictures from the egg drop case assembly:

And here I am on the roof of the preschool dropping the final products:

The kids did pretty well! 3 out of 4 eggs made it.

So that's all for Tanzania! I flew out on June 28th, and had a weeklong stopover in New York and New Jersey. More on that in the next post...and then on to Peru!

Game Planet...Because the PTA Owns the Name "Fun Day"

2010-05-19T01:36:00.000+07:00

That's right, you read that title correctly. Any sort of weekend or afternoon event held by a school entity, such as Primary Student Council, cannot be called a "Fun Day" even if that name is the most apt description of what is intended to happen. But I'm not bitter.

Anyway, Primary Student Council continued its run of fun events for students and hosted something that they decided to call Game Planet, which I actually like the more I think about it. It was supposed to be a carnival-type afternoon at school, with various games set up for kids to go around and play and win prizes.

This event happened a couple of months ago, but I have some fun pictures from it so I might as well write a bit about it. The Student Council kids thought up all of the games, decided how much to charge for entrance, etc. - so they were the idea people. I was the one who executed their plan. They had 7 games, open for about an hour and a half, then at the end we had raffle prizes, which have become extremely popular since I introduced the concept at the Halloween party.

Side note: there's a game called Tombola that's the kids really like and always want to do at events there. You just have a wall of prizes, with a number attached to each one (say,1-50). Then you've got the numbers 1-100 written on slips of paper in a jar and a kid draws a paper out. If their number matches one on a prize, they get that prize. I really, really dislike the concept of this game for the same reason that I've now started disliking raffle prizes: there is simply no effort, time, focus, or any sort of redeeming feature that the kids have to exhibit for this game. All they have to do is pull a piece of paper out of a jar, or in the case of raffles wait for their number to get pulled out of a jar, and they win something. They like the game because they don't have to do anything to win, and it's pure luck. In fact, I hesitate to even call it a "game" because there is absolutely no element of competition or sport. The fact that this is a lot of kids' favorite "game" really irks me.

OK, moving on. The games that we had at Game Planet were Sand in Cups, Long Jump, Ring Toss, Penalty Shootout, Musical Chairs, Treasure Hunt, and Bike Racing. Here's a Penalty Shootout shot:

Here are some Musical Chairs pictures:

Notice the big ham in the red and black shirt. He's in P4 and is a great kid.

Here are some Long Jump photos, the kids got pretty into this one:

Treasure Hunt was pretty fun - I got Hugh, the P5 teacher, to set it up. He hid little pieces of candy all around the preschool playground, then we gathered all the kids around and told them to find it when we let them onto the playground. Preschoolers and P1s got a small head start.

Then everyone else raced into the area:

And they went as far as they had to to locate that candy:

Bike Racing was the brainchild of Bruce and Kito, my 2 P6 Student Council reps. They made a course around the school with chalk, cones, and chairs, and kids went around it 2 at a time. It was quite popular, and they deservedly got praised for the idea.

And then, of course, at the end we had raffle prizes. But I added a twist this time: because I had gotten about a dozen, I had enough to give kids a choice when their number got picked. So I got a box and drew big question marks on it, called it the "Mystery Box," and every time a student came forward they had a choice between a prize that I showed them...and whatever lay in the Mystery Box. At least I could add a decision-making component to the activity.

Check out the look on this kid's face as he gets his prize:

That kid is hilarious anyway.

And at the end, they made sure no candy went to waste:

OYY: The Return

2010-05-02T18:17:00.004+07:00

As I've mentioned in previous posts, during our break between Term 2 and Term 3 I traveled to and from China to visit my students from last year at OYY, in Hunan Province. This was a fairly difficult trip logistically, for multiple reasons:

The break was 10 days long, and getting from Iringa to Xintang takes 3 days (and same for the return trip). So I'd only have 4 days at OYY.
I had to get a Chinese visa from the Chinese Embassy in Dar, which was a massive pain.
I would be taking multiple modes of transportation, some less reliable than others, which meant I would probably be making some last-minute decisions between backup plans.

Let me just say, before detailing the several issues I had in transit, that this trip was totally, completely worth it. I got a hero's welcome at OYY for some reason, it was wonderful to see the students and the teachers I had been friends with, I got to eat some good old Hunan food, and I discovered I haven't forgotten as much Chinese as I thought I did (though I have forgotten some, regrettably). But I didn't take nearly as many pictures as I should have. So I'm just going to intersperse pictures of me with some of my old students throughout this post.

Notwithstanding, the trip could have been (much) easier. Here are the various legs of my trip to China, and the complications they each carried:

April 2: Iringa to Dar: 9 hours on a bus, the day before the flight. No unusual issues, except we nearly missed the bus because my alarm didn't go off.
April 3: Dar Airport, Issue #1: Upon trying to check in at the Nyerere Airport in Dar, the good people of Ethiopian Airlines couldn't print my boarding pass. Apparently my name was on the passenger list, but the computer wouldn't let the attendant print my pass. None of the people working in the area could figure out why, but after an hour of scrutinizing my printed itinerary, quizzing me about how I made the reservation, asking supervisors, and finally checking the "master computer," they ascertained that my boarding pass authentication something-or-other was in China Southern airline's database. CSA was the other airline in my itinerary.
April 3: Dar Airport, Issue #2: But I finally got my pass and went into Passport Control, only to learn that my passport had no official Tanzanian Resident stamp on it (even though I most certainly have a residence permit). Apparently after obtaining my residence permit, I was supposed to take it to the Iringa Immigration Office and get a big official stamp in my passport...too bad no one told me this, so I didn't know it until I called the IIS principal at the airport and found out. So I had to convince the Immigration Officer that I really did have a residence permit, it was at my place of work, and he could talk to my boss if he wanted to. He gave me a lecture about how he was supposed to fine me, not let me out of the country, blah blah blah, but finally he let me through. Also, while I was waiting in the line there was a man in front of me who definitely had mental issues. A friend he was traveling with handed him a bag with 2 bottles of water in it, and he wound up and hurled it against a wall.
April 3: Dar to Addis Ababa: Flight #1, 3 hours. No issues.
April 3-4: Addis Ababa to Bangkok: Flight #2, 8 hours. Delayed takeoff but no other issues.
April 4: Bangkok to Guangzhou: Flight #3, 5 hours. Again, delayed takeoff but no big problems.
April 4: arrived in Guangzhou in the evening, too late to catch the last train to Hunan. Stayed in a hotel from midnight to 6 AM. Turned out to be fortuitous, because I used the internet to check the train schedules and discovered that in the last few months a bullet train line was built that goes from Guangzhou, through Hunan, to Wuhan!
April 5: took the bullet train to Hunan, arrived around 10 AM in Xintang. Booked a room in Xintang Hotel, completing the first half of my journey.

Once I got to Xintang, it was all good. I went to the nearest China Mobile outpost (of which there were many), got myself a new SIM card, and called Jenny, the now Senior 3 OYY student whose English is simply excellent. April 5 was Tomb-Sweeping Day, so the kids were on holiday and she was able to come meet me. We hung around town, ate lunch together, and she even got hold of Nancy and Jessie, 2 former students who are now in college in Changsha, and they came for a few hours as well. I gave them some souvenirs I brought from Tanzania, which they thought were pretty cool. Harry, another Senior 3, also met us a little later on, and his English is also really good and I was glad to see him.

In the afternoon, we headed back to OYY and I met this year's foreign teachers: Mark, Brett, and Sarah. It was interesting to hear about how their experience has been different from mine, Yoko's, and Jenna's last year. They were really nice hosts, and I really enjoyed getting to know them.

I got to see some other students as they came back from their holiday, and in the evening I went to see the teachers who we hung out with last year - Winnie, Ruth, Nick, etc. Sophie, my tutor, was on leave in Hengshan so I didn't get to see her. Bummer.

The kids are hams, same as last year. A picture of Class 83 before they saw me in the doorway:

And after:

On Tuesday and Wednesday, I was really busy! I visited the Spoken English classes, and taught sections of the Junior 2 classes. I just told them about Africa, showed them some trinkets, played hangman, you know, fun stuff. I met some of the Junior 1s as well, who are pretty cute as usual. I couldn't believe how much the Junior 2s had grown from last year! I played ping pong with some of them:

We had lunch with students and dinner with teachers both days - it was just packed with seeing people and catching up on things. I also went to English Corner on Wednesday, which was a mob scene, and I did Talking Show one day as well. I really don't think I could have crammed more into the time I had.

I had to leave on Thursday around 1 to catch the bullet train (it bought me a few extra hours) to Guangzhou, as I flew out Thursday night. It was kind of tough to leave, just as I felt like I was really hitting a (frenetic) stride at OYY again. I wish I could have stayed longer!

The return trip wasn't so bad as the outbound one: I had a really long layover in Bangkok, and my flight from Addis to Dar was delayed and so I had to stay an extra night in Dar, and I had to convince Passport Control in Dar again that I was a resident (this time I was armed with a copy of my residence permit, though, emailed to me by the principal), but I still made it back to Iringa on Sunday the 11th. Term 3 started on the 12th, so I made it back with hours to spare :-)

The Long-Overdue Sports Day Post

2010-05-02T17:15:00.004+07:00

As this is the first sort of free weekend I've had since Term 3 started on April 12, I'll take the opportunity to recap some of the major events that have occurred since my last post at the end of March:

The last day of Term 2, April 1, was IIS Sports Day - which will be the main topic of this post.
From April 2-April 11, I traveled from Iringa to China and back to visit my old students at OYY - which will be the main subject of the next post.
On April 17, the first Saturday of the new term, Primary Student Council (of which I am the teacher sponsor) hosted an activity day that they for some reason decided to call Game Planet. It made for humorous posters, at least. I'll put up a few pictures from that day as well.
The next weekend was a long weekend - we had Monday, April 26 off because it was Union Day, the day that Tanganyika and Zanzibar joined to become Tanzania. So I traveled to Dodoma (7-8 hours away by bus) that weekend to visit Aron, my friend in the Peace Corps.
And just 2 days ago, on Friday April 30, IIS had its first-ever Dance-Off, a combined disco/competition between parents, teachers, and students. It's notable if only for the facts that I was on the teacher dance crew (and in fact co-choreographed our team routine) and our crew name was the Professors of Groove. Don't worry, this will most certainly be its own post as well.

For now, let's talk about Sports Day. As the Senior PE teacher and obvious sports lover on staff, I was in charge of this event. The P5 teacher, Hugh, was in charge last year and helped me figure out how to change things from last year and what to keep. We spent most of March planning the various activities, getting materials, etc. The event itself was from 3-6 PM.

The entire student body, from Preschool up to A-level students, is divided into mixed-grade teams. Last year there were 6 teams, this year we bumped it up to 8. Setting the teams is a huge pain, because you have to make sure there's an equitable distribution of students from each grade level and from Secondary and Primary, that there's gender and athletic ability balance, and you have to deal with the students who come up to you every day before the event and tell you that they thought they were coming, but they're actually not and so I need to take them off the roster and reformulate the teams. I have to say, though, I did a pretty fair job.

Each team has a teacher leader and a color, and they chose their team names and made cheers and chants. We made chalk lines on the pitch to give each team a lane.

At the start of the afternoon, teams ran from one end of the school to their lane on the pitch. I had had an inspired idea the day before to give each team a theme song, and play it as they ran out. It was hilarious - some teams picked songs, and I picked for others. The songs were "Danger Zone," "Gettin' Jiggy With It," "Hey Ya," "Welcome to the Jungle," "The Final Countdown," "We Will Rock You," "Remember the Name," and, of course, "Eye of the Tiger." Here's the Red Team, a.k.a. the Terrifying Tomatoes, running out to "Hey Ya":

Their motto, invented by their very astute preschool team member, was "You can't catch up!" Ha...ha...get it?

Here are all the teams, lined up before the first race:

We held 8 races, with an intermission after the 4th race. The first race was the Potato Relay, in which potatoes were laid out at various locations in the team's lanes. The Preschoolers' potatoes were about 5 meters in front of them, the Lower Primary students' were slightly further, and so on until the Senior students, who had to run all the way across the pitch. One at a time, students had to run, grab a potato, and take it back to the starting line.

The second race was the Potato-on-Spoon relay. It's the same concept as the egg-on-a-spoon race, and we used the same line delineations for various grade levels that we did for the previous race.

The third race was pretty hilarious: it was the Giant Clothing race, for Primary students only. Each team was given an enormous T-shirt and a big hat, and one a a time students had to put on the big clothes, run to their team teacher (about 10 m away), then run back to the starting line and take off the clothes so the next kid could repeat the process. If you've never seen preschoolers run in XL shirts, with really intense expressions on their faces, you haven't laughed.

The fourth contest was an Egg Toss, for Senior students only.

At intermission, we had a Boat Race. Hugh and I somehow had this idea at the exact same time as we were brainstorming one day - he said he used to play it with his rugby team, and it was the drinking game of choice of the Stanford Crew team so I saw it done a fair number of times (if you know me at all, you know I dislike alcohol - my teammates let me drink water or soda). Anyway, in a Boat Race members of 2 teams line up opposite each other, each holding a drink. The person on the end of the line for each team starts drinking when the ref says go. When he/she finishes, he/she puts the empty cup or bottle on his/her head and that's the signal for the next person to start chugging. The first team to finish all drinks wins.

For this event, we used small (250 ml) bottles of water and pitted 8 members of each team against each other. It was awesome.

After intermission, the next event was the Obstacle Course, my personal brainchild that turned out to be too complicated for the kids. I had planned out all the various responsibilities for kids on the teams, we had practiced them, but still some of the kids made mistakes. All the teams finished it and we got times for all of them (we ran it as time trials, not all 8 teams at once), but it was pretty frustrating to watch what I was telling kids go in one ear and out the other.

Sixth up was the Pop-the-Balloon-on-the-Chair relay, in which each student is given an inflated balloon. One a time, students run up to a chair about 10 m away and have to pop the balloon by sitting on it. I liked this one because all the balloons popping made everyone wake up.

The penultimate race was the Water Bottle Filling relay, in which each team had 2 1.5L water bottles with small openings to fill. At the starting line, teams had a small cup and a bucket of water. Students had to fill the cup, run to the empty bottles (again, 10 m away) and pour the water from the cup to the bottle. First team to fill both bottles won.

The final race was a team-building exercise called "Crossing the Bridge": teams are told to get from Point A to Point B on the pitch, stepping only on pieces of cardboard they're given. They get about half as many pieces of cardboard as there are kids on the team (12 kids, 6 pieces). So big kids carry little kids, etc. It's cute.

At the end of the day, my flatmate Adam's team was victorious and everyone seemed to have an enjoyable time. We even had to have a sprint-off for 3rd place, because there was a tie. The parents got a real kick out of it too. I, who had spent the event running around getting various materials to locations; making decisions on possible rule violations; supervising and timing events; and doing other things at a frenetic pace, was pretty happy it was over. It was fun, though.

Now That's What I Call Hate Mail

2010-03-22T20:05:00.004+07:00

I took a quick trip to Dar last Thursday-Saturday to do my application for a Chinese visa - I want to go back and visit OYY during our 11-day break between Terms 2 and 3. I tried to have someone else do it for me, but the Chinese embassy refused to entertain the application unless I went in person to do it.

So I taught for the first two periods on Thursday morning, then took the latest bus from Iringa to Dar, which is a long trip already and was made longer by the fact that the bus engine kept overheating. But driver stopped several times to let the engine cool down, and finally in a town called Morogoro we switched buses...but not before waiting there for an hour. So we didn't get to Dar until about 9:30 at night. But I got to my guest house just fine and retrieved my papers from the person who had tried to apply for me.

Incidentally, Dar is quite hot. I've been in hotter places, like Texas in the summer or Australia in January/February 2009, but both of those places usually have pretty low relative humidity. In Dar, because it's coastal, this is not the case. The air is humid, so you just start dripping sweat when you're outdoors. It just makes the air conditioning in places feel that much better.

I took a taxi to the Chinese embassy on Friday morning, waited in line for an hour or so, and then handed in my application. The guy looked it over and said it was fine, so I asked if I could pay for the "rush processing" and pick it up later in the afternoon. His response: no, because the embassy does not offer the rush option for Americans...just for everyone else. Rather than fight the system, I just asked if my friend could pick it up for me and the employee said that was fine. So I once again left without my passport and took the second of what would be many, many taxi rides throughout the day.

I was charged with locating various objects for the school, so I took the opportunity to explore the various large shopping malls/plazas around Dar. Most of them had pretty much the same things, but I found most everything I was looking for and got to practice my Kiswahili with all of the taxi drivers I talked to. By my count, I took 9 taxi rides in less than 36 hours. Well, 8 taxi rides and 1 bajaji (motorcycle with a rickshaw-type seat attached) ride.

Anyway, I found one item that made me laugh out loud during my shopping explorations, and I took pictures of the varieties of that item:

It says, "Just to Say That I Hate You Really Very Much. You may say I have the wrong attitude, my nature is rude, my mentality is crude, or, I am prude-"

"Whatever you may say, all I say is - I Hate You."

"I Hate You" greeting cards!

I only saw them in one supermarket, but there were 7 different ones. I took pictures of all of them, and I just had to buy 2. They were only Tsh 1500 (about $1.15) each. Here are the rest:

"I Really Hate You."

And inside:

"Your anger and rude behavior makes me realize, How much I Hate you - You have always brought pain into my life. I Hate You."

Incidentally, I do not take responsibility for the errors in punctuation and capitalization. I'm just quoting them as they came. Next:

"I hate you for hurting me, and taking away my smile. I Hate You"

"To say that I Hate U"

inside:

"Just get out of my life for, I don't care where you go - go to Mars, Or, go to Hell, wherever you go - will suit me just as Well!"

"I Hate You so very much"

"Life goes through a phase of leaving and enjoying every moment, now life is going through a phase of regretting because of you. I Hate You."

"I Hate You more than words can say"

"I can't believe I am going to say this, but I have to say that I hate you for what you have made me go through and for the pain you've caused me. I Hate You."

"I hate you when you said you will call, and you never called at all. I Hate You."

I seriously laughed out loud when I saw these right next to the "Get Well Soon" cards and the "I Love You" cards, and pulled out my camera to record the sentiments that were printed. I bought 2 just to show people (I don't have any recipients in mind, don't worry).

So I had a nice time exploring Dar on Friday - it's the first time I've actually been able to spend more than a few hours in the city on my way to or from the airport. And I got the visa issue sorted out (I think...knock on wood), so it was successful as well.

I'll be sure to post about my visit back to China in April!

Safari Part II

2010-03-04T15:51:00.008+07:00

I know I haven't posted in quite a while, and the reason for that is that I've simply been working. Nothing incredibly exciting has happened: I spend most of my time either teaching or preparing for lessons. I take fewer pictures, so I find I have less to write about. But that changed last weekend, when I got to go on another safari!

Adam's girlfriend Heather came to visit, and we had a 3-day weekend because of Mawlid, so a safari to Ruaha National Park (the same place I went in September) seemed like a good idea. It's the rainy season now, and I had wanted to see what the park looked like compared to how it had looked in the dry season. So Adam, Heather, Maria, Maria's friend Gerson, Gerson's friend Aino, and I took a 2-night trip out west.

We spent Friday night at Tandala Camp, a campsite located just outside the park that's owned by one of the school families. It's one of a few upscale campsites in the area, intended for the traveler who wants to relax and get catered to and maybe doesn't feel the need to go on game drives in the park itself. It's a pretty nice place - there's a pool and a lounge area, you get served 3 meals, and the tents are great. They're "mosquito-proof," are solar-powered for electricity and hot water, and are elevated about 12 feet off the ground to prevent curious wildlife from snacking on guests.

The Camp is decorated with various skulls, including this massive elephant skull.

Maria, Heather and I felt that the skull deserved another picture:

On Saturday afternoon, we headed into Ruaha National Park with our guide, and it barely looks like the same place it did in the dry season. As a reminder, here's what it looked like in September:

And now, in late February:

What a difference. It is harder to see the animals now because the grass is so tall, but it looks so lush I didn't mind. The river is also completely transformed: in September it was barely a trickle, but now it's raging through the park. Here are Maria, Aino, and me on the bridge into the park:

We did see some new and interesting animals, including a ton of baby animals. Here are some baby warthogs:

A big family of elephants:

They were flapping their ears like crazy to keep cool. A troop of baboons crossed paths with us, literally, and they were carting babies around as well. It seems that they carry them both on their backs and on their stomachs:

We saw a mother and baby hippo:

Speaking of hippos, we saw a couple of hippos either playing or fighting in the water:

Those things make big splashes. And on land, we had to watch out for elephants crossing the road:

And giraffes as well:

On Saturday night we stayed in the bandas (huts) in the park itself, where we used this extremely sophisticated setup to make dinner:

We didn't have to do much - just boil water for pasta, then heat the sauce. It did the trick. The evening's post-dinner activities were highlighted by the much-anticipated arm-wrestling match between Gerson (it was his idea) and myself:

Not trying to brag here, but my superior endurance carried the day, and after a mighty struggle I prevailed - in both our right arm and left arm battles. Gerson wants a rematch.

On Sunday morning, on our last game drive, we heard that there was a family of lions out and our guide did his best to find them. We knew we were on the right track when we saw this zebra with a chunk taken out of its side:

And after a couple hours of searching, we found them! Two full-grown males, plus some adult females AND some cute little cubs!

They were fed, it seemed - thankfully. And they were in a playful mood:

We had a bit of a scare when our jeep's engine conked out right there, but fortunately another safari group gave us a little push with their car, literally.

I'm not sure how that helped our car start, but we got out and nobody was eaten.

We headed out of the park in the early afternoon and arrived back in Iringa around 6 PM. It was a nice way to spend a weekend, and good to get out of Iringa for a bit.

My Excellent Journey

2009-12-26T07:25:00.009+07:00

My apologies for not posting anything in a month..."busy" begins to describe the hectic schedule that accompanies the end of a school term, but doesn't do it justice. Among other responsibilities, we have to administer end-of-term assessments, write out report cards for our students (in my case, that was for not only my 12 kids, but for all of the senior students as well because I teach them PE), practice for End-of-Term Celebration, and then execute said celebration.

So let me just address the first half of the month briefly and say that it was jam-packed with work and I'm pretty sure everyone at school is quite happy to be on break at the moment. Term One started on August 31 and ended December 17, and encompasses nearly half of the school year (there are 3 terms total). It includes two of the biggest annual school events, International Night and the Celebration. But it's done now, and after a fairly long journey to return to Texas for the holidays, I'm here in my room recuperating from the wisdom tooth extraction I underwent the morning after flying into Dallas/Fort Worth.

For this post, I want to talk about getting here from Iringa. First, I had to get from Iringa to Dar es Salaam. My list of flights started on Sunday, so on Saturday Hugh (the P5 teacher) very kindly drove me and Adam (who was also flying out on Sunday) all the way to Dar and to our hotel. It's an 8-hour drive, but we didn't hit too much traffic and it wasn't that bad.

On Sunday, I flew from Dar to Cairo, arriving in Cairo around 11 AM and reaching my hotel - the luxurious Hilton Golf Resort - at about 12:45 PM. Now, of course I can't afford to stay at a hotel like this on my own, but luckily for me my dad travels a lot and has amassed a hefty number of Hilton HHonors points...enough to get me a free room for one night at this hotel! And when I checked in, they must have seen my dad's point total and decided to treat me well - so they upgraded me from a double room to a SUITE, which was pretty great. It was so cool I had to take pictures.

It had its own balcony:

As soon as I unpacked, I hopped in a hotel car and went to explore the Pyramids of Giza, which were conveniently located just 20 minutes away from the hotel. Here you can see part of the Cairo skyline:

I was pretty excited about this, as you might imagine, and this wonder of the ancient world did not disappoint. Here's a picture of the complex (the Great Pyramid is the one on the right):

The Great Pyramid, with the Sphinx in the foreground:

From another angle (the Great Pyramid is on the left):

The structures are completely enormous. Here are the Pyramids of Khafre and Menkaure:

Once you stand next to the Great Pyramid, it boggles your mind. How humans managed to construct it thousands of years ago is practically beyond my powers of though. Each individual stone is enormous, as you can see from this picture:

The hotel driver was really nice and walked around with me and took some pictures. He thought this one was quite clever on his part:

After we took some pictures, the driver showed me where to go to take a camel or horse ride around the area. He recommended a horse, because camels are very slow, but the guide let me take a picture on the camel anyway before we went off on horseback. Here are pictures of me on both:

We trotted around the 3 large and 6 small pyramids, and you can see Saqqara in the distance behind the Great Pyramid. In this picture, all you see is sand:

Regrettably I didn't have enough time to go there and see the step pyramids. But we did go see the Sphinx!

It's impressive, obviously, but I have to say I thought it would be just a little bigger. Not sure why. I know it's very large, but the pyramids dwarf it. Again, though, it's still amazing.

The last place I went before leaving the area was inside the Great Pyramid. It cost extra, but I figured it would be worth it. I was wrong. All you do is walk inside, crawl up through a massively long tunnel:

and end up in a big dark room with nothing in it but an empty sarcophagus and an AC unit. It's cool to say I've been inside one of the Pyramids of Giza, but I expected a little more. Overall, though, it was incredible and I'm glad my flightplan worked out the way it did so that I had the chance to explore the Pyramids a bit. Here's one last picture from the ruins, of me on the steps of the Great Pyramid:

The next day, Monday, I flew from Cairo to Frankfurt and had a one-night layover in Frankfurt. Serious weather turnaround - I went from sunglasses and flipflops to my heaviest winter coat. And it was snowing! I stayed in a very nice hotel close to the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof (main train station). Here's a few shots of my room, which was quite efficiently organized for its limited space:

And then, on Tuesday, I flew from Frankfurt to Chicago and then from Chicago to DFW. The weather was starting to turn in Chicago, but I convinced a counter attendant to give me a standby ticket on an earlier flight to DFW (the one I was booked on was delayed by 2 hours at that point) and I was lucky enough to get on it. So I made it to DFW late on Tuesday night.

Wednesday morning, I went to the dentist's office to get my 4 wisdom teeth removed. My face currently bears a marked resemblance to a chipmunk's, and I've definitely taken more painkillers in the last 3 days than I have in the last 3 years. But - get this - it snowed yesterday and today in Fort Worth! According to the newspaper, the last time it snowed and stuck on Christmas was in 1997, so this is pretty momentous.

I'll be sure to post again soon about my students, since I can finally put up some of the funny videos I've taken of them. In the meantime, happy holidays!

Just Call Me Farmhand Elizabeth

2009-11-27T18:48:00.004+07:00

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…

2009-11-16T20:46:00.008+07:00

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:

----------

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!

----------

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

2009-11-02T00:19:00.006+07:00

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

2009-10-28T03:03:00.003+07:00

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

2009-10-20T02:42:00.005+07:00

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

2009-10-14T01:45:00.002+07:00

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!

2009-09-19T14:56:00.008+07:00

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!

Some Really Old Stuff…Plus, A Long, Dusty (but Pleasant) Walk

2009-09-14T00:26:00.007+07:00

Note: like my previous post, this one was written a couple of weeks ago and because of internet issues I didn't get to post it until now. Soon, my posts will catch up to present day :-)

4 weeks ago was IIS New Teacher Orientation, which included two trips to local landmarks to get us acquainted with some places of historical interest in the area. On Thursday morning, we headed to the Mkwawa Museum, a tiny single-room space devoted to Chief Mkwawa, a chief of the area’s native Hehe tribe. He gained fame in the 1890s for resisting the German invasion into Tanzania and in fact won a battle against them, largely because the Germans underestimated the Hehe’s force. They came back the following year and defeated the Hehe soundly, but Mkwawa escaped and went into hiding, and fought them guerrilla-style for a few more years. Once he realized his capture was imminent, he shot himself rather than be taken captive. When the Germans found his body, they decapitated him and sent the head back to Germany for triumphant display in some museum there. In the 1950s, one of Mkwawa’s descendants finally asked for it back and the Germans returned it to Tanzania. And now it sits in this little museum in a town called Kalenga, about 20 km west of Iringa. When I say little, I mean one room:

Here's the inside of the museum:

The museum is located in Kalenga because that’s where Mkwawa had built the fort where he and the Hehe lived before going into hiding. The Germans decimated it, but you can see the outline of the fort and some of the old stones. Our guide also showed us the Tree of Miracles that stands at one edge of the fort—it’s actually a couple different trees that somehow grew together, and the guide said that people used to come to the tree and make sacrifices in hopes of realizing some wish or dream. It’s also said that sometimes you can hear people singing around the tree, but you can’t see anyone…and that if you build a fire around the tree, all the way around, if you stand in the middle by the tree trunk you’ll be unharmed. The tree:

Some of Mkwawa’s relatives are also buried outside the museum, which is surrounded by a small garden. The museum itself is small but has some interesting artifacts, like old Hehe shields and spears, drinking and eating implements, and of course, Mkwawa’s skull itself. Here are some eating plates and bowls from the 1880s and 1890s:

And the centerpiece of the museum, Mkwawa's skull:

They also have some old weapons, such as this rifle used by Mkwawa:

Our guide was very knowledgeable and polite, as are most people I’ve met around here so far. Side note: on the way to the museum, this is what most of the homes looked like. They're made of clay and have thatched rooves, and the native tribe, the Hehe people, live in them.

So that was a cool little outing, and we followed it up on Friday morning with a visit to the Isimila Stone Age Site about 25 km south of Iringa. As the name would indicate, this is a location that was inhabited in the Early Stone Age by early Homo sapiens. It used to be a lake, and humans lived there because they could hunt the animals that came to drink at the lake. It’s now a dry riverbed (apparently during the rainy season the river reappears), and various excavations have turned up tons of Stone Age tools like hand axes, scrapers, and sling shots. Here's a view of the riverbed:

I even found an artifact myself as we were walking through the riverbed! Here's the hand axe I discovered, being held by another new teacher's son:

A lot of the ground around the lake/river was clay, so erosion has gradually washed a lot of it away over the last 50,000 years. But there was also some sandstone streaked into the area, and sandstone has remained and become stand-alone pillars and sheer faces of rock. A lot of it is topped with a granite-based rock, from the volcano that used to be nearby. The rock faces are pretty cool because you can see the striations from different periods. Here you can see some of the pillars:

Here's a better picture:

This was the tallest pillar in the group (you can see me, ant-like, at the bottom):

Here's a pillar they call the Cathedral Pillar, because it arcs around like the nave of a cathedral and you can stand inside it (as I am doing here):

These pillars are called the Organpipe Pillars:

We also saw a rock hyrax (sort of like a desert/mountain rabbit) and a Gama lizard. The males have bright red heads and blue bodies, as you can see here.

Another interesting site, and definitely a place that could be used for a geography or history field trip.

And for the last exploration of the week—on Saturday morning, I decided to just take a walk outside town and see where it took me. So I walked through the main part of town and got on the main road heading west out of town toward Kalenga, responding to every “Hello my friend, how are you?!?” that got exclaimed at me and waving at every kid who yelled, “mzungu!!” (literally, European; taken to mean visitor or foreigner) at me. They don’t yell angrily or anything of course, they’re just excited to see a foreigner and wave at her until it looks like their arms are going to fly off.

Anyway, I walked out of town and down a big winding hill, just looking around and seeing what there was to see. I passed a lot of little dirt roads, but they all looked like they were just residential streets so I didn’t go down them. After an hour and a half I came across a dirt road perpendicular to the main road that looked like it actually went somewhere, so I went down it. About a kilometer down, a group of girls dressed in school uniforms were throwing rocks at something on the side of road, and I looked over to see what it was. They saw me and said, “Snake! Snake!” I didn’t see a snake, but they had probably scared it away by then. With the snake gone, they turned their attention to me, asking what I was doing (the answer “just walking” is somewhat rare, it seems) and where I was going. They volunteered to walk with me and show me what was down the road, so I said OK and off we went. They were pretty excited that I had a camera too:

They spoke decent English because all the schools around here are English immersion, and I learned that they were all 13 or 14 and that in Swahili, my name is pronounced “Elizabet-ti.” As we walked, they showed me small farm with pens of cattle, a secondary school that they didn’t like because it wasn’t “cooperative,” and their community church. They were also fascinated by my hair, and kept staring at it and touching it…as you can see in this picture.

The road ended after 3 or 4 km at a place called Mawelewele Primary School, where several little boys were playing soccer and gawked at me as we passed. I told the girls I should go back home soon, so they said they would show me where they got water and then walk me back to the main road.

We went past the school and started walking down a narrow dirt path, nearly overgrown with weeds. We went past some banana plants and a couple very friendly women crossing our path greeted me and said I was welcome. Here are the banana plants:

Then I heard the sound of rushing water, and just a few hundred meters down the path we came to a small clearing with a huge water faucet in the middle, pouring water onto the ground.

The girls said all the people who lived around the area came there to get drinking water (it has to be purified, of course), to wash, and to launder their clothes. Indeed, we saw one man washing his legs at the faucet and a few women scrubbing clothes nearby. There was also a little stone slide of sorts next to the faucet—well, it was probably just an incline to move water from a pool down to the ground, but there were a few little kids using it as a slide.

It was remarkable how green everything surrounding the water was, as compared to the dry and dusty state of all the other flora I had seen so far in and around Iringa. Pretty cool to see the local water source.

The girls then accompanied me back to the main road, and I began my return walk to Gangilonga (the area of Iringa where my flat is). I walked part of the way with some secondary school boys who were returning home after Saturday morning school, and a couple of them spoke English very well. And it was cool just to talk to some local people and hear about their lives outside the superficial exchanges I’ve had so far at shops, with retailers. I was a little surprised that none of the kids I talked to, the girls or the boys, had ever really talked with a foreigner before given the number of foreigners in Iringa. But they don’t live in the central part of town where most foreigners stay, nor do they live in the little tiny villages way outside town where a lot of them “volunteer.” So I enjoyed my cross-cultural exchange time, and returned in the early afternoon to the flat. I talked with still more locals a couple hours later when I went running; I was going past a soccer field and a few men were shooting around. I looked at them and they saw me, and they motioned me over. So I jogged onto the field, which was sand (oy) with a goal formed by 3 thin tree trunks, and they said hello and I kicked around with them for a little while. They were very nice, even though I was clearly inferior to them in soccer skill, and said I was welcome to play with them anytime. I’ll certainly be taking them up on that offer!

Next post: Birthday Safari! You won't want to miss this one!

A Quieter Part of Iringa

2009-09-08T12:18:00.004+07:00

A quick note: last week was the first week of school, and I’ll write about that – but I wrote this entry a couple weeks ago and didn’t post it yet, so here it is.

Turn left outside the gate in front of the flats, and you’re a 10-minute walk away from IIS. Pretty soon the pavement gives way to dirt, and the road branches out every so often to the right or left. You can head further out of town down dusty dirt paths, and the roads will take you past some churches, a school or two, and many nicer homes where several of the expats live. One of the IIS families has a tennis court in their yard…good news for me! I hear it’s not the greatest court, but I’m still pretty excited about it. These homes all have gates and gardens around them and are pretty large:
The difference between these homes and the small shanties, some with metal siding for walls and thatched grass for a roof, that I’ve seen in other parts of town is pretty drastic. Here are what the roads look like once the pavement ends:

Some of the paths do have names, and boast these corporate-sponsored road signs:

There’s also a Haile Selasie Drive, which I believe is a feature of pretty much every town in Africa. The roads aren’t really confusing or disorganized, and they’re roughly gridlike across a span of probably about 2 km by 2 km. I haven’t fully explored the area, but there are also roads that extend further out of town past the grid. And once you get past the grid you can really see the hills and mountains that surround the town:

One road will take you up a little mountain (large hill?) to Gangilonga, the “rock that talks.” It’s a landmark in Iringa. Kristeen, Adam, the new P1 teacher Maria and I took a little hike up there during orientation, up this semi-paved road:

I know it’s pretty dry and dull-looking now, but bear in mind that it’s winter and the dry season here. Once it starts warming up a bit more and raining, Kristeen says it looks amazing. Here’s a shot of Gangilonga:

The girl in the picture is Maria, who’s from Tanzania but speaks flawless English and went to college in New Orleans. She and her mother live just downstairs from me and Adam. We climbed up to the top of the rock, spotting lizards and one little monkey on our way up. You can get a great view of the town from the top:

And of course, an even better view of the graffiti covering the rock.

It’s a pretty cool spot, and I actually ran past it the day before we went on my first exploratory run without knowing what it was. After getting settled over the weekend, I figured that the best way for me to get some exercise (along with, hopefully, some tennis matches) will be to run around the roads outside town. During daylight there are people walking along them, there’s very low vehicle traffic, and apparently I’m not the only one around here who uses them for recreational exercise. Kristeen, the IIS principal, said several of the school parents run in the morning, and on my Monday run I crossed paths with an Iringan out for a jog. So around here, it’s not the running itself which is unusual, it’s the fact that I wear shorts--combined with my gender. But Kristeen, Maria, and several others assured me that I wouldn’t be offending anyone by running around in shorts, mostly because I’m a foreigner (“mzungu” in Swahili) and Iringans are used to seeing foreigners do things they generally don’t.

So I’ve gotten into a solid running routine, with runs of varying degrees of hilliness. There will not be any totally flat runs around here. My first run was up on the road past Gangilonga, going straight uphill for as long as I could. What I might lose in long distances here (unless I start doing laps or something) I will definitely make up for in difficulty and altitude. I’ve been finding roads and routes that are 4+ miles pretty easily, though, so I’m pretty sure that running these roads at 1600 meters above sea level is going to do wonders for my lungs and red blood cell count. Plus, running along these dirt roads and hills in southern/eastern Africa makes me feel a little bit like Peekay, which I enjoy greatly given my fondness for that character (hope someone got that reference).

Next post: some new teacher outings, plus a little solo exploration.

Americans Call Them Apartments

2009-08-25T01:38:00.004+07:00

But because I’m in a former British colony, my new home is called a flat, and it’s located in a residential area called the NSSF Flats with a gate and an armed guard. Here’s a view of the flats:

All of the guards around here are armed, though, at the bank, at the post office, everywhere, so he’s not particularly special as guards go I guess.

As you exit the gate, you can turn right, and go up this road toward the main road and into Iringa:

Or you can turn left and go away from town, and head up the road toward IIS, Gangilonga Rock, and some nicer houses. We live in the district of Iringa called Gangilonga, named for this rock (it means “the rock that talks” in Swahili). Iringa has several districts, but I don’t know their names yet. There’s also a pub just across the street:

It’s definitely not the only one in town!

The complex has 3 blocks, each with 6 or 8 flats. One other new IIS teacher lives here, but she lives downstairs with her mother (they’re both Tanzanian). The IIS principal, Kristeen, also lives here with her family. I am in Block C, Flat C-3. Here’s Block C:

We’re on the second floor, on the side opposite the “Block C” lettering. I share the flat with one other teacher, a new teacher named Adam who spent the last couple years teaching English in Japan with Berlitz. He’s a really big Buffalo Bills fan, so we’ve already had multiple discussions regarding Trent Edwards’s durability and potential (let’s just say he’s a little more optimistic than I am). The flat is actually designed for 4 people, but it just turns out that this year only the 2 of us were put in this flat. There are 5 new teachers, but one is living with her mom, one has a kid and so they’re in their own place, and the other is living at the student boarding house. So Adam and I each get our own room, and separate bathrooms and showers. Here are my room and my shower/sink area:

Notice the mosquito net over the bed. Not essential yet, since it's still winter here, but I'll be using it once it heats up for sure...though we've been told that the flat is pretty secure from bugs as long as we keep doors closed and screens pulled.

And I guess we could use the 2 extra bedrooms for storage or something since they’re unoccupied. We share a porch, living room, dining room, and kitchen. Here are the living room (you can see the porch behind it) and the kitchen:

Check out the crazy double bananas that were left for us as a welcome gift:

The whole places is pretty spacious and very clean; in fact, we have a housekeeper, Rahema, who comes in 3 times a week. She cleans, cooks, and does laundry for us (it’s all by hand, no machines here). She does the laundry in this little area off the kitchen:

Her cooking is spectacular, we give her the equivalent of a little less than $10 and she goes out, buys food at the market, and supplies us with enough food to last at least 2 very well-fed days, and usually enough for 3. Today she somehow made cinnamon rolls, which were previously on my list of "foods I didn't think I would be eating in Tanzania."

As I’ve mentioned, the cost of living for me here is much higher than it was in China. I’ve been here for 10 days and I’ve already spent as much money as I would have in a couple months in Xintang. A lot of that is just one-time setup and housekeeping expenses, but I was still surprised at the prices here. The currency here is Tanzanian Shillings (Tsh), and the current exchange rate is about 1100 Tsh/$1 USD. Very few items are less than $1. Our rent is $100/month and we pay utilities on top of that (water, electricity, phone), and we pay Rahema as well. Internet here is also absurdly expensive: the flat already had a modem, but the system is similar to using a prepay cell phone. You can connect your computer to the internet from the flat using a username and password, but you have to charge your account before you can use it and you recharge constantly. And they don’t charge by the minute or hour, they charge by how much information is exchanged, or how much bandwidth you use. So downloading videos or watching streaming video will run down your credit really quickly. I figured out the cheapest way to do it, and it's still about $30-$40/month. Not inconsequential. But I am getting paid far more than I was in China, and I’ll be able to save most of it, which is good.

Next post: the outskirts of town and Gangilonga Rock.

The Blog Returns

2009-08-20T00:28:00.004+07:00

After a vacation in the US, the blog (and I) have departed home soil and headed out to a new place – Iringa, Tanzania. In this first entry from Africa, I’ll tell you about my somewhat lengthy journey to get here and my first impressions of the town of Iringa.

I left the US on August 12^th, flying out of Los Angeles, where my mother and I had been visiting my brother.

Flight #1: LAX to DFW (Dallas/Fort Worth), 8:10 AM to 1:10 PM

3 hour flight, 2 hour time zone difference

Flight #2: DFW to FRA (Frankfurt, Germany), 2:45 PM to 7:05 AM Aug. 13

8 hour, 20 minute flight, 8 hour time zone difference

So now we move to August 13^th, where I began with an 8-hour layover. But I found an excellent reclining waiting chair, and spent a couple hours playing computer games and doing some Swahili lessons I downloaded. The best descriptor I can think of for the airport is “European”--from the multilingual staff and metro-dressed guys (so many popped collars, argyle sweaters, and loafers!) to the awesome electrically-powered maintenance carts. Then it was time for:

Flight #3: FRA to CAI (Cairo, Egypt), 3:40 PM to 8:50 PM

4 hour, 10 minute flight, 1 hour time zone difference

Followed by a 4-hour layover in Cairo, because my next flight boarded and took off an hour late. It was August 14^th when we took off:

Flight #4: CAI to DAR (Dar es Salaam, Tanzania), 1:30 AM to 7:10 AM

5 hour, 40 minute flight, no time zone change

The Dar airport is possibly the smallest “international” airport I’ve ever been in – one terminal, two baggage conveyor belts. Once I went through customs, I met the taxi driver the school had sent to take me to the long-distance bus station. That’s right, the trip wasn’t over yet! The driver took me to the station, got me a ticket on the 10:15 AM bus to Iringa, and gave me his phone number, saying that anything could happen with the bus driver strike going on, and left. Bus driver strike? Turns out that there’s a big strike all over Tanzania, but for some reason he didn’t seem too concerned so I decided not to be either. I wound up sitting next to an Englishwoman who spoke Swahili, and she ascertained that the bus drivers were indeed on strike and there was no way to really tell when or if we would leave…but the attendant thought we would leave today and suggested waiting for an hour. So we waited, and shockingly, about 20 minutes later buses started leaving! By 11:30 we were on our way. Here are a few pictures I took on the streets of Dar:

After a 9-hour bus ride with 2 stops at intermediate terminals and highlighted by sightings of a giraffe and a herd of oryx, I arrived in Iringa at 8:30 PM on August 14^th. The principal of Iringa International School and my new employer, Kristeen Chachage, and my new flatmate Adam met me at the station and we made the very brief drive back to the flat. More about the flat in a later post.

To recap: to get from LA to Iringa, it took 21 hours in flights, about 18 in layovers/waiting, and 9 hours in a bus. Add to that the 11 hour time zone difference, and you have a case of jet lag that sends you to bed at 5 PM. On the plus side, I’ve started a 6:30 wakeup routine so I’ll be used to it by the first day of school, August 31^st.

I got my first look around Iringa on Saturday. It’s located in the middle of Tanzania, in a region called the Southern Highlands. You can find it on Google Maps. It’s surrounded by hills and some national parks, and we’re about 1600 meters above sea level. It means the air is drier and a bit thinner, but that’s good because (1) it’ll make my lungs more efficient, and (2) mosquitoes don’t survive as well up here. I’m still taking malaria pills, but most people here don’t and malaria incidence, particularly among foreigners, is quite low.

Our flat is on the outskirts of town, and it’s just a 5 or 10-minute walk to the central shopping area and main road. The town is organized around one main paved road, and just sprawls out from there. Here’s the part of main road nearest to the flat:

There are tons of shops and little stalls, including many touristy souvenir stalls. Some roadside stalls:

There’s a fair number of foreigners here because of Iringa International School (henceforth referred to as IIS), some program called Student Partnership Worldwide that sends undergrads here for short stays, and the churches. Everyone (at least all the Tanzanians) goes to church. There are Muslims, Ismaili and Sunni, and Christians: Catholic, Anglican, Pentecostal, Lutheran, Greek Orthodox, Baptist, and Seventh Day Adventist. There might be more I just haven’t seen yet. There’s also an Indian population that practices Hinduism.

Anyway, there are several churches in town and on the outskirts where people live. Most of the shops around town fall into these categories: grocery, stationery, hardware, electronics, and home furnishings. There are also stores that sell random household goods, from buckets to mirrors to power strips so I have a hard time categorizing them. Here are some stores, most of the streets look very similar to this one:

It’s similar to the stores in Xintang in that they all sell pretty much the same thing, but that’s where the comparisons to my old home in China end. Iringa is much larger, with about 125,000 residents, has a much higher foreigner presence so a lot of shopkeepers speak some English, and has a way higher cost of living. In terms of appearance, they’re both rundown in different ways; stalls and small shops look pretty much the same, but there are no big restaurants or hotels here that I’ve seen, and nothing that has the “modernized” (more cement and tile, less wood and corrugated metal sheeting) construction and overabundance of electric lights that some places in Xintang had. And no place I’ve seen has air conditioning or heating…but since we’re in a subtropical region, it’s pretty unnecessary. In the middle of town shops and stalls are crammed pretty closely together, particularly around the main produce market:

The market has fruit, vegetables, spices, and several kinds of dried fish. The green mound in the picture is all bananas, and there are WAY more where that came from. No slabs of animal carcass waiting to be hacked, like in the Xintang market…there are actually little butcher shops here and there, and some groceries sell frozen packages of meat. Near the main market there is a small park with a little wooden stage and an area that’s used in the mornings by several people to play soccer:

There’s no large grocery store or supermarket like the one in Xintang (which I would never have thought to call a supermarket until seeing the stores here)—most of the groceries are single rooms, about 20 feet by 20 feet, with shelves lined with items. Some aren’t even walk-in stores; a storekeeper stands in front of a wall of products and behind a counter, and you tell him what you want.

Every store has a mix of Tanzanian and Western goods, mainly British; and interestingly, the few slightly larger stores I’ve been to have decently sized liquor selections. Of course, I won’t be exploring those and am quite grateful that I won’t need to ingest copious amounts of beer in short time spans like I had to last year. The stores have British candy, cereal, drink mixes, and some brand of condiments called “American Garden.” I even found Pillsbury cake mix in one store, which is sort of absurd. Having all this sort of stuff readily available (though slightly expensive) makes me feel sort of like I’m in a British colony.

So that’s a bit about the town of Iringa – I’ll talk more about it in later posts, of course. Coming up in my next post: an introduction to my new flat.