Sorry for not writing with
more regularity! Things have been a little crazy.
For the past two weeks we
have been hosting our arts workshop at the Umoja Youth Empowerment
Center. This center is the first facility that AAI worked with. It
started off as a one-week project, but now we have an entire two weeks with the
students. They are all very eager and willing to take huge risks.
It is exciting to work with students that are so comfortable with each other
that they hold nothing back.
Last Wednesday night Elsie,
one of the teachers from ISM, has us over to her house for dinner. Her
two sons were our students at ISM. They had their driver pick us up from
the center of town and drive us to their home. We bumped around in the
back seat of a truck up to the tippytop of a hill where her house lies.
On our way up we made a sharp right turn and encountered an entire heard of
goats and cows that a local Masaai boy was moving around. The driver must
have been used to this because he just drove straight on through, knowing that
the animals would part for the car. Once at Elsie's she had a beautiful
meal for us. She is Scottish, as is one of our team mates, so she had some
traditional Scottish foods. We ended the night with watching a video of
the ISM Student Dance from their performance the previous Friday. It was
great to get to see her again. Her home was beautiful! It was a
once story house with really high ceilings and tons of windows. She pays
200,000tsh per month for renting her house and the acre of land that it sits
on. That is about $175.
Thursday night several of us
from the hostel went to ViaVia to hang out. People here only go out on
Thursday and Saturdays, so Thursday it was! After a couple drinks I fear
that we ended up being the entertainment, rather than the live band playing,
but it was fun anyway! It was a terrible reggae band, so we spiced things
up. We were snuggled into our beds
by 11:30 since we had to teach the next day.
Friday wasn’t very eventful,
so let’s move on to Saturday!
Four AAI teammates,
including me, woke up at 5am on Saturday morning to head to ISM. Eanna, the principal of ISM, met us
there with a thermos of hot coffee and his big jeep. We piled in and tumbled around the back of his truck for the
two hours it took us to drive to the Tarengire National Park. We had mentioned to Eanna that we
wanted to do a cheap one-day safari to a nearby national park. Eanna offered that since his family is
out of town and he has a jeep, he would love to take us around the Tarengire
Park. We spent all morning driving
around the park stopping to watch animals that would walk right up the
road. Throughout the day we saw
zebras, two warthogs, two dikdiks, vervat monkeys, elephants, waterbucks,
impala, giraffes, wildebeest, a grey headed king fisher, a barbat bird, a long
crested eagle, a yellow neck spur fowl, a southern ground-hornbill, a von der
ficken’s hornbill, a lilac crested
roller, secretary birds, a monitor
lizard, a pie king fisher, love birds, mongoose(mongeese?), and gazelles. Eanna is a bird watcher, so he could
spot birds far in the distance and identify them using this huge, foot-long
camera lens. I have two favorite
moments from our safari (which is the Kiwsahili word for journey). As we were driving we passed a small
body of water. No animals were
there, so we kept on driving. We
then encountered a slow moving jeep, and decided to turn around and take a different
route. Thank goodness we did! Just as we were approaching the
waterhole agin, a group of about 25 zebras were walking up to it. Some just drank, but others indulged in
a full-blown bath. We switched off
our engine and listened to them lap up the water and splash all around. When they were finished they all headed
off as a group in the direction that they came from. We turned on our car and kept heading down the road. Just up the road the spotted a lone
elephant bull. He was walking in our general direction and we shortly realized
he was headed for the waterhole as well.
We did a quick 27-point turn on the tiny dirt road and settled in a
quiet spot behind a tree to watch the elephant. The approached the water delicately and took his time
drinking through his trunk. I
swear he must have only gotten a drop each time he brought his trunk to his
mouth because the moment he took his trunk out of his mouth tons of water would
splash back to the ground. Didn’t
seem like this method of drinking was efficient to me, but then again he seemed
to be in hurry. After his drink he
walked around the waterhole and made way to us. Eanna was very careful to quickly turn on the engine and
start off in the other directly.
Mr. Elephant took our hint and decided to use the tree we had been
hiding behind as his scratching post.
We listened as he shook the tree with each itch. Then, to top it off, we sat and watched
as he pood, peed, and went on his way.
It was really an experience!
For lunch Eanna arranged for
us to go to a safari lodge that is within the National Park. A friend of a friend owns the lodge,
and made us feel very welcome. The
dining area sat at the top of a cliff, so we ate our sandwiches and looked out
into a real life version of scene you would see in The Lion King. We took turns with Eanna’s binoculars
spotting elephants, giraffes, and zebras splash around in the almost-dry river
that ran through the park.
My second favorite moment
came towards the end of the day.
Rainy season just ended, so the park was full of fresh, green life. With this life comes migration! As we were driving on one of the
winding roads we came face to face with some zebras that were crossing the
road. As we stopped to let them
pass, we realized that these guys were not alone. There was a line in front of them and line behind them that
stretched far beyond what we would see.
These zebras were migrating and we happened to catch them enroute. As we continued on the road we followed
the line of zebras. Sometimes they
traveled in large clumps with spaces in between, and sometimes they formed a
clean single-file line. The moment
they heard our engine fire up again they would scurry away and stare back at us
waiting for us to drive off.
I would say that we saw a total of 400-600 zebras on our little
adventure.
Needless to say, we all
passed out on Saturday around 9pm with tired eyes from searching the horizon
all day.
Sunday was uneventful, and
Monday we went back to Umoja. We
spent all week teaching classes and prepping for our performance that we are
having tonight.
Thursday night the four
dancers of the group arranged to have a “teaser” performance at ViaVia, our
venue for our performance with Umoja,
Like I said, Thursday night is a hot night at ViaVia and the place is
filled with mzungus. We scheduled
to have a three minutes performance at about 12:05 on the big stage at
ViaVia. We prepped a short piece
an hour before and headed to ViaVia around 11:30. There is a little something they have here that they call
TT, or Tanzania Time. We didn’t
end up going on stage until 1:45!
They managed to entice a huge crowd of people to watch our
mini-performance and we ended up staying until 3 trying to spread news about
our show and sell tickets. We will
see if our “teaser” was interesting enough to get people to come tonight.
Yesterday we took all 42
kids to ViaVia for a rehearsal in the space. A lot of the old Umoja students came to watch our rehearsal
because they can’t come to the show tonight. We also had several translators and Umoja administrators
there with us to help communicate with the kids. At the end of our rehearsal they performed two thank-you/goodbye
songs they had prepared for us.
There were, of course, tears involved and it will be really hard to say
goodbye to these greats kids, some of which are older than us, after the show
tonight.
One day this week, I
honestly can’t remember when, Molly and I stayed after school because the girls
wanted to play with our hair. We
somhow managed to leave Umoja with four cornrows. Molly’s are on the left side of her head, and mine are on
the right. I have to admit, we
both look gangsta. We have taken
copious pictures showing them off.
I just got a little preview
of a video that will be posted on AAI’s website later today. If you have time, take a look! You will get to see my lovely cornrows,
and I almost bite the dust right at the beginning.
Thanks for reading!
No comments:
Post a Comment