This entire week was spent completing a long succession of preparations to wrap up classes and to prepare for moving into the houses of host families and for our week break. We met our host families at a big dinner celebration at Dr. Roberts’ house. I’m living with two other girls in the Towo house. Baba (Father) Arnold and Mama Lightness both work at UDSM, Baba as a professor of civil engineering and Mama as a secretary in one of the administrative buildings. They have two daughters; Anita is 20 and is away at boarding school, and Nina, 10 years old, is the life of the family. They are very nice and are very excited to take good care of us. When we moved into their home, we discovered that we had hit the jackpot housing lottery. The house is situated at the top of a housing development area specifically for the upper faculty members of the university that is situated on a hill. House highlights: lush and green backyard complete with mango and papaya trees, throne toilets with a seemingly infinite supply of toilet paper, hot water to take a bucket shower with (still a luxury even if the hot water is obtained not from the tap, but by boiling water in an electric tea kettle and transporting it to the upstairs bathroom), a television (tvs actually become rather scary when you haven’t seen one for a while), and two maids, referred to as our ‘dadas’ (sisters). After waking up in a dorm for the past few weeks, waking up to morning hustle and bustle of the house is a most welcome change. Our family is pretty interesting mix of Tanzanian customs and British/American culture: the family eats toast, eggs, and tea for breakfast instead of the usual fried dough common in the rest of TZ, they watch shows like “Dancing with the Stars”, “Top Gear” and “The Weakest Link”, since they lived in the UK while Arnold was completing his PhD, Nina speaks English with a British accent, we play games like Apples to Apples and Uno,and Nina is enthralled by American music divas like Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus, and Justin Beiber. For the first week, Nina would only call me ‘Miley’ as my hair reminded her of Miley Cyrus. The first week we had lots of bonding time with the family, including one night where Nina decided that all the girls should watch “Twilight” with her. After avoiding the Twilight series with a passion in the US, I wasn’t keen to watch it in Tanzania. But Nina assured me that she would give us all her stuffed animals to hold onto during the scary parts of the film and that she would kindly narrate the parts of the movie for us before they happened. In between learning the ins and outs of our family and new house, we were studying for final exams and packing for our week breaks. This week we also bought bus tickets at Ubungo - quite an experience as Ubungo is a city built around its gigantic bus terminal. There are people everywhere at Ubungo who are trying to sell you phony tickets for buses that don’t exist, and they can be quite persistent in their efforts. We also returned the day before our departure to make sure that the bus did actually exist and was leaving at the scheduled time. This week I also went to dinner at Mama Jane and Baba Luata’s home (Caleb and Noah’s host family). Mama Jane is the hall warden/director of bweni namba tatu (hall 3) and she is the very picture of Tanzanian motherhood. Before the meal, we chatted with Baba Luata (he’s Maasai) and played with their two young daughters. Throughout the meal, Baba and Mama would make comments like: “Eat, eat, eat more Valerie!”, “Valerie, if you don’t eat, you will never be a good mother”, “You will have no energy to chase around your children some day if you don’t eat now!” and other comments along the same lines. It is worth mentioning here that I was eating heartily while they were saying this. It also didn’t help that while they were saying these things, Caleb was not only echoing their sentiments, but giving them encouragement to go on. All in all, it wasn’t malicious or condescending in any way, they were genuinely concerned for me as good Tanzanian parents. To give you a peek into a Tanzanian mother’s mentality: if her child’s belly is not potruding, the child either does not like the food they are given or must be sick. In America where being thin and fit is valued, in Tanzania it is the rotund women who fetch the highest bride price for their families. This week we also made final preparations for Kili with a trip to Mlimani City to pay the travel agent and get food for the climb. The last day of our classes we had to put on a 10 minute role play in Kiswahili with our study groups. My group decided to do a mixture of Hamlet and a Midsummer’s Night Dream with a Tanzanian twist, while another group did a sock puppet play, and another did a play on Star Wars. On Saturday, we all woke up before 4 a.m. to meet our dala dala bound for the bus station in Ubungo. We crammed 20 people, plus luggage, into this tiny vehicle - truly a memorable experience. We figured everything out at the bus station and heading on our bus bound for Arusha. 10 and a half hours later, we arrived and met up with Courtney’s friend (ie our accommodations for the night). We also bought tickets for the next day for our bus to Moshi. The next day, we went to the bus station and thankfully found the man who had sold us our tickets. Unfortunately, he had sold us tickets to a bus that didn’t exist, but since we were sitting there and demanded to know where our bus was, he found us a bus and we made it just in time. Our seats on this bus had been procured 5 minutes before the bus left and with the aid of 2,000 shillings as a convincing agent. But it all worked out and we traveled safely to Moshi on the most dangerous highway in all of Tanzania. Once in Moshi, we called the driver with our tour company and he picked us up to take us to our hotel. That night, we met our guide, Martin, and went over the last logistics of our trip before going to get snacks and then watching a movie in the hotel. When we went out to dinner, Martin met us and told us that we could not climb the next day as the had overbooked the rooms in the huts on the mountain. He assured us though that we would climb the next day. The next day we went into Moshi and sat at several cafes and restaurants as we relaxed the day away eating mango crumble cake, smoothies, and delicious Indian and Tanzanian food. When we decided to go back that night to our hotel, we got on a dala dala and asked the driver and attendant if they knew where our hotel was. They responded in the affirmative, and away we went….in the opposite direction as our hotel. We then asked other people if they knew the correct dala dala to our hotel and they helped us to tell the driver to stop so we could get out and find another dala dala. Unlike Dar, the dala dalas in Moshi do not have their destinations printed on the front of the vehicle. They let us out on a semi-rural street in the dark next to a university that wasn’t in session. After being creeped out, we called Martin, who said that he couldn’t come and pick us up. After a bit, another dala dala came by. Unfortunately, it broke down as soon as we boarded on. So three of the passengers had to go out and push it for a bit before it revved to life. We made it back to our hotel in one piece and were laughing about the whole thing by the time we got back. On the whole, everything is working out very well and I feel amazing lucky and blessed to be experiencing new, exciting, and sometimes scary things.
