Kyle's first trip with a passport!

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  Arusha, Tanzania
Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Hello!  Hope everyone is doing well and not getting too sick in the cold weather.  Below is a quick update and then Kyle's thoughts on his trip to Tanzania.  Enjoy!
 
This semester is shaping up and after a delay of only one week. Classes are up and running.  This semester, I will continue with my core course: Political Thought, Research Methods, and Issues in Development but will add Health and Development and State and Civil Society (aka the history and strengths of Socialism with well-known socialist, Professor Othman).  This past weekend I attended a RYLA (Rotary youth leadership awards) conference in Bagamoyo, which was held for Rotaractors (Rotarians will know this: but, it's usually held for high school students but here they held it for college students involved with Rotary in order to just get it going).  It was interesting and even fun.  However, at one point, they had an HIV/AIDS presentation that was the worst I'd ever seen

01 Giggly Swedish friends

.  It was by the director of the organization no less.  It was full of misinformation, juxtapositions, and confusion.  It made me want to switch my research on the accountability of orphans and vulnerable children's organizations to research on accountability of HIV/AIDS organizations.  There is so much money coming in for HIV/AIDS trainings but it's difficult to regulate.  Again, I hate to say anything negative about good causes but sometimes there needs to be better checks.  On the flip side, though, many organizations are functioning very well and have made huge differences in Africa.  Anyway, that's my soap box paragraph.  Next week I'll post some news about the supposed demonic possession of our house girl and other new stories.

Kyle Goes to Africa
 
I've never been anywhere.  Sure, there have been trips to New York and Hawaii, and my life in Washington DC is quite a lively experience, but these are places within the realm of familiarity.  It was America.  You know what to expect: pre-wrapped, uniform America.  The billboards say exactly what you would expect them to say.  You know where to look for things.  The vending machines are always in the same nooks, and the bars will have Budweiser.  These are givens, and they go unquestioned in the mind of the boy who is applying for his first passport

02 Starting the safari

.

I departed for Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, from LAX on New Years Day, 7 p.m., after a nice hot shower and a stop at Starbucks.  I figured I wouldn't have the opportunity to do either for a couple of weeks.  This trip was the beginning of a mental shift, a realization that the "givens" I had grown accustomed to should be identified.

My 28-hour journey included an overnight layover in the Zurich airport, I stepped off the plane and into the Dar Es Salaam Airport.  I no longer had any idea where the vending machines were.

Thank God for Jess.  Though I hadn't seen her in six months, she recognized a harrowed and travel-weary Kyle, and loaded me in a cab.  She was to be my guide and confidant for the remainder of the trip, and honestly, I would have been lost without her.

The state of Tanzania was shocking.  Now, some of my opinions (they are most definitely my own) about Tanzania may not be the most open-minded, so let me just say this before I begin: I believe that my girlfriend is safe there.  That should speak volumes

03 Sunset

.  And I care about the state of Tanzania, so my concerns are not merely complaints.  These are just the observations of someone that has seen three weeks of Tanzania, and nothing else.

Now:

-The roads...I can't describe the roads.  How I took for granted the double yellow line.  The entire hierarchy of "right-of-way" eludes Tanzania.  It's merely the car that's there first or the bigger one.  Yet, with such trouble over drinking water, governmental organization, a private fire department, and the obvious diseases and poverty, what can really be done about the roads?  Only a select few were paved, and all of them had crater-sized potholes.  Yet the cab drivers were all acclimated, and bounded over the hills in modified sedans.

-Once out of the city, the land was breathtaking.  It was like walking through a Discovery Channel special, complete with shoulder-height termite columns and small, adorable monkeys.  The indigenous people wore bright red shawls, carried walking sticks (and talked on cell phones closer to the resorts), and herded cattle (the children kept after the goats.) They all waved at me passing by, understandingly, as if they knew I could never fathom their lives

05 Twiga (Giraffes!)

.  They were right.

-I let Jess haggle.  She's MUCH better at it than me. Plus, she speaks Swahili (remarkably well, though I had picked up a couple words I have since forgotten).  And we had to haggle for everything.  It was strange to walk into a store, and immediately realize you are being sized up for your level of ignorance.  They had me pinned.

-The safari in Arusha was the most memorable aspect of the trip.  Every animal that could kill and eat me on the entire continent was at one point no more than a few feet away.  We met up with the most giggly Swedish girls on the three-day journey, one of whom lost a sandal to a hyena in the middle of the second night (RIP sandal.)  But they were great fun, and teammates on our excursion.

-After the safari, we flew to Zanzibar, and on the first night, I thought I was going to die.  Let me explain: we arrived on the 12th, and after walking the alleyways and shore side restaurants, we passed out early.  And, in the middle of the night, we awoke to gunfire.  Okay, I SWORE it was gunfire.   I locked the door and pranced around nervously, while Jess kept the level head and called the hotel

06 Warthog (Kyle's angle)

. After a little translation problem and many more claps of noise outside, Jess arrived at the answer.  It is my opinion they should warn American tourists that the midnight firework celebration of their Liberation Day sounds an awful lot like gunfire.

-I have never been anywhere.  But in Tanzania I realized that I also knew very little.  I did not know that Coca-Cola bottles get recycled and reused as-is.  I did not know that there existed places where policemen accepted and expected bribes (we saw it happen), while thieves caught red-handed were subjected to the extent of mob rule.  Or of a place that where giving my snack to one child meant I'd be swarmed by 20 others, where sleeping up against the mosquito net at night would result in over 120 bites all over one side of my body and where armed men holding rifles watch your hotel at night.  You don't think about these things ahead of time.  And yes, they make sense in retrospect.

But coming back to "The States," I realized the incredible amount of invisible systems that keep our society stable.  Things like building codes, the FDA, Triple-A, and stoplights.  How far removed Safe-way is from the guy who grew the nectarines.  And the eco-friendly pesticides he was approved to use so I can eat them. 

07 Baby Baboon

With all these systems, we are protected.

It seemed to me that Tanzania lacked these.  It was a nation of people making the best out of a limited situation with little guidance.  They were good, warm people who had been routinely failed by any number of things-gone-wrong.  And I am finally beginning to understand why Jess is so interested in the politics and the "plumbing" of nations like this.  There is cause for concern, and at least someone cares to learn about it.

Saturday morning, January 19th, I arrived in Washington and, with much appreciation, I had a Starbucks coffee, and a shower.

Post your own travel photos for friends and family More Pictures

08 Lioness	09 New friend we helped out of the mud	10 Hippo	11 Hiking
12 Kyle	13 the Crater at Mt. Meru National Park	14 Zanzibar	15 Beaches of Zanzibar
16 Kendwa, Zanzibar!	17 Beach Bums	Kyle and George (the giraffe)

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