Holidays!

  All over Tanzania!, Tanzania
Monday, July 7, 2008

Sorry it's been so long again, I've been all over the place - village, travelling within Tanzania for my holidays and back in Iringa sick again!
 
After I last wrote I spent a couple of weeks in my village, just teaching in the primary school because the secondary has closed down for holidays, and trying to give some seminars in the community. The teaching is still going great, ever improving as my level of Kiswahili also improves, but working with community adults remains our largest challenge. In the week before leaving for holidays we had planned four seminars; one couldn't be done because my partner Jacob fell ill and had to go to town to be tested, but the other three were scheduled to be done in sub-villages around our main village (some of which are up to an hour and a half by foot) but upon arriving in each of those sub-villages we were met by empty seminar spaces, with not even one person showing up to listen between them. This has been the most disheartening part of my work so far; planning, preparing, and then seeing that no-one is interested coming to hear what we have to say, or even ask questions or receive any kind of less formal health education. Yet we, as SPW volunteers, have been invited to work by the villagers themselves.
 
It sometimes seems as though many villagers hold the misconception that we have come to hand out money, t-shirts, posters, footballs etc, most of them want those things (which we don't have), but not the education and advice that we've come to provide.
 
I can't blame it all on apathy though. In a small rural village like the one I live in, work can easily be disrupted in other ways. Funerals/mournings are a huge source of disruption, as bad as that sounds... In an average week in Ukumbi (population around 1500) there are one or two deaths, after which many villagers will spend two full days at the home of the deceased, doing nothing else. This causes the whole village and its people to stop work, meaning that if we have a seminar planned, we must forget about doing it for a few days. Obviously there isn't much that we can do to avoid this disruption, as it's just a cultural difference we have to accept and do our best to work around.
 
Other difficulties include the laziness of important village leaders and officials, who have deliberately been unsupportive, absent and indifferent in an attempt to coax us into paying bribes to get them to cooperate (for their own good and for the good of the village!). We need their support to advertise seminars and to send influential sub-village youths to us for extra training so that they can continue with some of our duties after our departure. So for some time we were facing a dilemma as to whether we should pay the bribe and get their cooperation or to fight on without giving in to corruption. The situation is finally improving now, despite our steadfast refusal to pay the lazy corrupt bastards. Instead of bribery, we used a tactic from our childhood - nagging. We visited them daily, often more than once, at their homes, at the office, at the bar, to keep asking for the cooperation we needed until it became easier to give in and help rather than put up with our numerous visits. Yes, it was a huge waste of time, a little degrading, a little sycophantic and the bribe wouldn't have cost much, but after seeing first hand the damage and anger caused by the rife corruption in this country, I never want to pay anyone a bribe.
 

Mikadi Beach Camp, Dar es Salaam

  Sorry for the rant, now on to happier memories of holidays since then! In mid-June, we left village for our holidays. I started in Dar es Salaam, relaxing on a beautiful beach just out of town, doing little but reading and playing volleyball for a few days.
On the 14th, a few of us went to the Tanzanian national stadium to watch Tanzania play Cameroon in a World Cup qualifying match.

Tanzania vs Cameroon in TZ National Stadium

It finished 0-0 but still a good game and great fun to watch it in a packed stadium in football-crazy Tanzania. Sveinn arrived that night, so the following morning we set off for the city of Arusha in the north of Tanzania, the starting point for our two-day safari. Our group of volunteers and our guests numbered around fifteen, so the first to arrive at the bus station in Dar reserved us all on the first available bus to Arusha. When Sveinn and I arrived, I paid an agent of our bus company, but apparently it wasn't the same guy the reservation had been made through, so it caused a little argument about commission. This quickly became an aggressive shouting match, then escalated into a fist-fight between colleagues, ending in blood, tears and police! Welcome to Tanzanian travel Sveinn!
 
The following morning we set off for Lake Manyara National Park, where we were lucky enough to see one of the park's famous tree-climbing lions falling out of his tree!

Lake Manyara National Park

Also there were the most incredible giraffes, and everything else you see in the photos.

Ngorongoro Crater

The second day of safari was even better, in the magical looking Ngorongoro crater, one of the most beautiful places I've ever been lucky enough to visit, just as special the second time around! Highlights there were the density of wildebeest, zebra, hippos and flamingoes, and a very close encounter with two elephants.
 

Our house in Zanzibar

Next up was a few days in a beach house on Zanzibar, where we lay around and read by day and partied by night, including one night at a full moon beach party at the other end of the island, which required a six hour round trip that night/early morning! Going on a short snorkeling trip from our house had whet our appetite for a full dive, so Sveinn and I left the beach house a day early to go scuba diving around the north of the island. The dive was fantastic, going under for an hour and a half, amongst brilliantly coloured fish and coral, including sea lions and slugs!
 

On top of Mkapa Towers, Dar es Salaam

After Zanzibar I went back to the beach camp in Dar es Salaam, where I began to get sick again, though it was the end of my holidays so I didn't have to cut anything short. I got back to Iringa and found out that I had Amoeba, probably caught from dirty water/food. It did mean that I missed our top-up training, despite being at the training centre I was feeling too lethargic and have had to sleep lots over the past week.

Ugali competition

I've recovered now and will to return to my village of Ukumbi tomorrow.
 
I hope everyone reading this is happy and well,
I'll be home soon!
Lots of love,
dipak

Mikadi Beach