Here Comes the Sun

When Anande reached out about me coming back to Tanzania this year, I picked October as the month because it gave me enough to prepare AND it was the end of the dry season with the jacaranda in bloom.

The most important part of that sentence are the words “dry season”.

The sky should be bright and the ground should be dry!

It is supposed to be the dry season. The short rainy season shouldn’t start until the week after I leave, with the occasional short shower leading up to it. However, Mother Nature had other plans. Maybe it’s the cabin fever or maybe it’s because I just think it’s hilarious and I can’t stop laughing about it, but I began to compose those fake Civil War letter tweets to myself.

Dearest Martha,

It has been five days, 13 hours, and 26 minutes since I last saw the sun. The solar power is getting low, and I am now resigned to taking cold showers as a result. It would be warmer to run naked through the rain but apparently my neighbours have a problem with that.

Dearest Martha,

Due to circumstances, I am forced to wear proper shoes instead of my beloved flip-flops. My only hope is that I grow webbing between my toes to make the 20-meter commute easier. No one tells you about the out-of-season rain, Martha, and I feel that I have been lied to… despite this not being the first time I have experienced out-of-season rain.

Dearest Martha,

Today, I told the locals that even the mzungu was cold. They laughed. Then they told me to drink more kahawa and chai to warm up. But drinking so much I pee on my leg every 10 minutes isn’t going to solve the problem which is that everything is cold and damp.

Even with the downpours, patrons and students still found their way to the library.

Part of this is of my own making. Playing the odds and making room for all the donation items I was bringing, I cut out pretty much all my warm clothes options. Heck, it was just a last-minute decision that I’d want jeans on when I got off the plane coming home that means I even have a pair of pants to wear during these cold days. My jeans that I left in my knapsack because I wasn’t going to need them until my trip home.

On the upside, while it was still lightly raining when I woke up, it has stopped since and the sky is bright. There is still a cloud cover, but it’s not the dark clouds we’ve had for the last week. I am optimistically hopeful that the sun forecasted for Sunday might arrive a little early. Goodness knows, we could all use it.

UPDATE: When I wrote this, we were without power and Internet. Since then, both have returned along with the sun! Sing it with me, folks!

The other downer is that I had to cancel my weekend trip to Kigali. Well, didn’t have to, but it made sense. In my jetlagged state upon arrival, I forgot to ask for a multi-entry visa. It’s an extra $50US, but that’s what would allow me to leave for a weekend and come back. Instead, I got a single-entry visa which means that if I leave Tanzania, I must reapply for a whole new visa upon re-entry. That’s $250US because I need to have a Business visa even for unpaid volunteer work.

The staff get a delivery of hot tea (chai) every morning. The milk comes straight from the cow.
Luckily, the tea is brewed in the milk as the milk is heated so my stomach doesn't rebel as result.

Every time I come here, I think that maybe this is the time I just do the paper work for a Class C Residents Permit. That would mean 5 years of being able to come and go without getting a visa every time, but the paper work to get a Class C Residents Permit is a pain in the rear and I’d have to go to Dar es Salaam for part of it because I’m not actually living here for those years, and if I have to leave before the process is done – highly likely – then the whole thing gets scuttled and I’m back to square one on my next trip anyway.

Went for a walk today (Sunday) around Ngongongare and ran into two of my
coworkers, Rena and Liz, as they were coming from from church.

At any rate, I spoke with people who know the visa situation in Tanzania better than I do and reviewed all the options. When time and money was factored in, they were all too much: too much time going in and out of Arusha in the hopes they might change my visa to multiple entry, too much money to get a new business visa for only a week and a half of volunteer time left.

I’m disappointed, but I’ll survive.

Just another reason to come back!

Happy Sunday, Everyone!

Fight the Power (Outages)!

I am still alive!

Unfortunately, power outages have been playing with my "scheduled" blog times. This is happening, no doubt, because I had just finished telling a few friends that the power outages haven't been that bad this time.

BOOM!

Eleven hour power outage on Sunday.

No power means no internet.

*sigh*

Time to start writing posts offline and just posting them when I have power! Until then, enjoy this picture of the jacaranda from my trip into Arusha on Saturday.

Arriving to Life in the Slow Lane

I can say with certainty that running up the escalator in your stocking feet is not something that should be on anyone's to-do list. I know this because that's exactly what I ended up doing on Saturday morning. I had such a short layover in Seattle that I got it into my head I must being going through US Customs before boarding in Victoria, like some of my previous trips.

I was wrong.

Between construction at the airport and what felt like eleventy billion flights arriving within 30 minutes of each other, my short connection time got even shorter. Which meant I spent my time in line guilting the people in front of me for security into letting me cut before running up two flights of escalators and across a SEA-TAC terminal in the aforementioned stocking feet.

Those little ridges on the escalator HURT!

On the upside, I learned that US Customs now has an app called "Mobile Passport" which means I pretty much skipped 90% of the customs queue. Highly recommend getting it if you're flying to the States, have a smart phone, and are eligible for it (US citizens, US permanent resident, or Canadian citizen).

Sunrise over the North Sea

I was pleasantly surprised when I arrived at Kilimanjaro to find a renovated immigration area. Part of the renovation included ropes to help create lines of people instead of the traditional clusterf*** they had employed for so many decades. Of course, the ropes only went back far enough for about 20 people so getting to the nicely roped off areas was still a free-for-all.

Despite these improvements, I still failed to get out in under an hour. At the rate they are improving the airport, I expect to get through customs in less than 30 mins by 2035.

On the upside, I walked out to find both Paulo and Anande waiting for me. It was a nice treat to catch up with Anande as Paulo drove. Once we turned off the paved road, the rest of the drive was like this.

I arrived to find that Frida had cooked me chipsi mayai (French fry omelette) for a pre-bed snack, and I devoured it before falling asleep for 10 wonderful, uninterrupted hours.

I spent a restful Monday recovering from jetlag by reading my Le Carré novel on the patio while Frida cooked and cleaned. She also decided to lead a one woman assault with a can of "Off!" against two flies that left the place stinking of the stuff for an hour. She was very proud when they final dropped dead, although I hadn't the heart to tel her that I think it's because she drowned them and not from the magic properties of the bug spray.

My view for much of Monday

I was visited by Big Mama and Wee Jimmy, two wild dogs that call our compound home during the day. Big Mama has been a fixture on the campus for a few years. She's part of a pack of wild dogs that roam the area, but our compound is her space and she chases off any other dogs who dare enter. Or she did until Wee Jimmy showed up shortly before my last visit. He was a very young puppy of questionable intelligence, and I think she tolerated him more because he was just too stupid to realise she was trying to chase him away.

In the two years since, Big Mama appears to have mellow and is friendlier. Where she would once move the minute you got within 10 meters of her, she happily trotted to the patio to give me a quick sniff before heading on her way. Wee Jimmy, on the other hand, tried to say hello and ended up running into the patio wall. Like I said, not the smartest dog in the village.

I headed to the library early Tuesday morning for my first day there. I'll talk more about that in a later post, but I was pleasantly surprised when one of the patrons smiled at me and said "I remember you." It was Amret who I used as my guinea pig for RACHEL-Pi training!

After a full day of work at the library and a quick meeting with Anande to discuss our focus for the grant writing, I ended today how I imagine I'm going to be ending a lot of my days: siting on the patio, eating my fresh fruit dessert, drinking tea, and watching the sunset on Mt. Meru.

Anticipate seeing a lot of these sunset pictures.