Karibu Tanzania

(I originally started writing this on October 8th but have been interrupted several times throughout so that explains the length and such.)

“Welcome to Tanzania”

Thank you everyone for your patience and support throughout this early process.  Quite a lot has occurred and I hope many of you have been anxious to read about what all I’ve been up to since my plane landed in Dar es Salaam on Monday.  It’s difficult for me to not spend a lot of time writing these entries because I love to tell you all about the things that have occurred since I left Portland on Saturday morning.  I hope you all forgive me for not dedicating a lot of time to this since I’ve arrived but as you can imagine, my time would be better spent meeting my new peers, making good first impressions, and hopefully becoming friends with them.  Also, for every minute I spend on a computer is a minute I could have spent out exploring this fascinating please.  So thanks once again for taking the time to read and making an effort to stay in touch.  With that out of the way, here’s what has been up…

My plane landed at about 1 PM local time on Monday and I made it through customs just fine with both my checked bags slowly making their way onto the carousel.  I’d been studying from my Kiswahili text book that I used last school year throughout the trip and shortly before I left so I was prepared to speak the language despite how horribly jet-lagged I was.  I found our driver right outside the doors of the international arrivals holding a sign with my name on it and he led me over to our program coordinator Ken.  Ken has been with us quite a bit since we first got him and I’ve become his favorite person to pick on but we still get along for the most part.  The three of us got some lunch while we waited for the next incoming flight from Dubai that had three other people from my program on it.  It was during lunch that I learned we wouldn’t be staying in the dorms right away but rather at this resort until Thursday.  I soon learned that this resort would blow away all of my expectations.

I opted to study abroad in a place far from my comfort zone and I therefore was mentally prepared to go out and rough it.  I’ll let the pictures and video do the talking for a bit so you understand just how nice this place is.

(edit: this is taking forever to upload so maybe in a future time or date I will post them.  Really sorry about this.)

….Yeah.  I’ve also got photos and some video of the scenes we’ve experienced while driving to and fro here which more accurately depicts what I was braced to find when I arrived in Dar es Salaam.  I am writing now from my new dorm room; my home for the next nine and a half months which is whole world away from our luxury stay at the beach but let me just say that I haven’t really felt like I was even abroad or doing what I’m here to do until today because I’ve been spending all of my time with the eleven other students (all Americans – 7 of which with strong Oregon ties) in the program for the last few days and we’ve been separated from the realities of Dar es Salaam for the most part by the frame of an air-conditioned van.  Traveling the streets of Dar es Salaam though are an entirely different experience though that I will share another time.

We have done many things since we arrived here on Monday.  (I stopped typing midway through this sentence on Thursday evening and am just now finishing up on Saturday morning.  I’ve experienced quite a lot since then so there may be a different tone from this point on.)  We’ve had to take care of some key business everyday so far and the number one priority seemed to be that we all have working cell phones so on Tuesday we headed out to a mall to buy phones and SIM cards.  It’s free for me to receive calls and I think with Skype you can purchase credit and make calls to any number in the world for as low as two cents a minute so if you want my number and to try to figure out how to do that, let me know (keep in mind the time difference though please).  The other days have generally all started with paperwork and/or meetings to help us get our study visas squared away and explain to us the importance of being safe.  I’ll write more on the topic of safety at another time because I’m sure we still haven’t heard the end of that.

After our morning meetings, however, we have always had some sort of activity planned for the rest of the day or at least the afternoon.  Wednesday was spent on Bogonyo Island, a small island area that was about a 10 minute boat ride from our hotel’s beach.  This was by far the nicest beach I’ve ever been to with it’s white sand, clean and clear water (definitely cleaner than our hotel though it wasn’t as warm), hammocks tied up between the trees and huts to rest under as well.  I love the ocean and even though I got stung by some coral and I’ve had this weird red bumps on my feet since that day that weren’t from the coral and I can’t explain, it was an outstanding experience.  It was definitely very confusing to end up in paradise when I had convinced myself before I left home that my life would be considerably less luxurious when I got here.  Trust me when I say, though, that the vacation has ended.

We finally were able to move into our dorms on Thursday and everyone was excited about that.  My first impression of the campus area around the dorms is that we are living in Jurassic Park.  The plants are prehistoric and vines are strung down from high up in trees.  All of the buildings here are open air and very aged/poorly maintained so that they almost look abandoned and/or condemned.  All that is missing is the tall electric fences and the nervousness that accompanies being surrounded by dinosaurs but not actually seeing them.  We helped the girls move into theirs first (there is only one other guy in this program besides me – don’t know if I’ve mentioned that yet) and then headed off to ours.  Ken had told us that they reserved rooms in the “nice” dorms for foreign exchange students and I just spent the last year living in a trashy apartment so I was prepared for the worst.  What we found was a dingy building like the rest that just looked decayed and would probably have been demolished if it were in the U.S.  I realize now that at the peak of its newness, my room would probably have been better than the Bean dorms at U of O, but that must have been ages ago.  The bathroom is the worst though as it looks like something that would be found in an abandoned mental hospital or school from the 1930s.  We will be taking cold showers with very low pressure throughout this trip so long as we’re at the dorms.  Unless, of course, the water stops working (which is prone to happen) in which case we have buckets with which to collect water in and pour cup-by-cup over ourselves.

There definitely is an entirely different set of standards here than in the United States but this has been the most revealing one for me so far.

(I’m watching a four-inch-long lizard crawl along the corner of my room right now)

The rooms in the men’s dorms have windows opening into the hallway area and they didn’t have curtains so we had to head out on a wild goose chase late Thursday night into the streets of Dar es Salaam.  We wound up off of the main road for the first time back in this cramped little dirt street with a few khonga/kitenge vendors still open.  I’ve watched the streets from the car and seen pictures in books and online before, but this was my first time actually walking in such an area and it is a completely different experience.  Until you actually walk on the trash and inhale the air that reeks of burnt refuse, feeling the heat with each breath and step while realizing you’re a tall white guy in the middle of a busy street in Dar es Salaam at night that isn’t a main road, then you haven’t really experienced anything near what pictures will show you.  We did end up getting the curtains though to cut the story short because I have to go take a shower now.  We are going to downtown Dar es Salaam today for the first time and hopefully I will be able to finish this when I return.

It’s Sunday morning now, our first free day, and I finally will be finishing this and hopefully posting it online sometime today.  Yesterday we went to the actual city center for the first time and it was once again an experience somewhat tainted by the fact that I was traveling with like 12 other people, most of whom are white.  Being in downtown Dar es Salaam doesn’t really feel much different at all from being in any other big city’s downtown area though I’m sure I would have had a different time if I were walking those streets alone.  We eat lunch at a restaurant called the “New Zahir Restaurant” I think and it is a place on Mosque Street where Malcolm X used to eat all of the time back when he lived in Dar es Salaam.  There were different mosques on this street to for every different sect of Islam and it is really cool to see the different architectural techniques they employ and think of what that says about them as a religion.

We used the dala dala minibuses a lot yesterday and that will probably be the main way we move around when we’re here so I’ll write more on that in the future.  I am getting more comfortable with the public transportation around here and that is a good thing because next I need to get better at just conversational Kiswahili so I can chat with the driver and negotiate a price so I don’t get screwed because they think I don’t know.  We have been using this one guy that we pay extra to go off of his normal route for the last two nights because he took us to this Irish pub for a girl in this program’s 21^st birthday last night that was a lot of fun.  We also went out the night before to this cultural center place where we ate traditional food (ugali) and got to see/hear some traditional dance and music performances.  They even brought us up to dance with them several times and it was a really fun time to see all of the people in our group up their dancing and kind of making a fool of themselves in front of everyone else.  I didn’t have my camera but if someone else from my program posts pictures I’ll put them on here to share because it was a blast.

One last little anecdote that I was wanting to share now so that I’m all caught up on this blog is something that happened on Friday afternoon after we finished our walking tour of campus.  I was really thirsty at the end of our long walk and so were some other people so we stopped in at the dining hall to get some water to hold us over until dinner.  The girls had seen a monkey outside their dorm the day before and were impressed, but we saw some more above us in the trees later that day just on our way towards the CIEE office.  Outside of the dining hall we were walking towards were about 20 monkeys just running around playing with each other and trying to come in and steal food.  Like I said, everything here is open air so they can just walk right in and go wherever which they did.  Just yesterday morning one stole a banana off this girl’s plate as she was scooting her chair in.  There is this one really big alpha male monkey though that no one wants to mess with.  I call him “El Jefe” but hopefully he has a cooler and more Swahili nickname that works better.  I’ll try and get some pictures of just how close, how many, and how cool it is to have monkeys right next to you in your own dining hall.  Now come on, who else can say they have this sort of experience when they study abroad?

Cheers,

Scott