Back in Burkina

Now we are finally back home...kind of. Neither of us will be spending more than a week at a time in Titao until mid-September because we are working with the new group of volunteers during their PST during July and spending the month of August in Ouaga teaching English through the American Language Center. The little time we have in Titao has been spent trying to get our trees from Earth Day into the ground. To be honest, we should have planned this better. Trying to find volunteers to help us dig holes when everyone is busy cultivating in the fields is tough and those who aren't busy want to be paid to for digging hundreds of holes (can you blame them!).

We are putting 240 trees at the hospital in town. Since the Doctors Without Borders clinic will be using the trees for their malnutrition program, we arranged with their director to have the women staying at the clinic spend an hour one morning and help us dig the holes. Unfortunately, 10 days before we had planned to dig, a new director took over their program and now it is "pas possible." After hearing this, the rest of our meeting did not go well. The director mistook my silence for a problem of comprehension instead of shock and disappointment and then began to speak to me in loud, slow ENGLISH. Needless to say, messing up my plans and speaking to me like a child in my own language did not endear her to me and I left soon after.

After this set back, I embarked on a sympathy campaign around town to find holediggers. This consisted of riding around town, stopping to talk to anyone I knew, and shamelessly showing them my blistered hands while I asked what they were doing tomorrow morning. I went to school and offered the use of my soccer ball to those who would come and help (I get to play of course).

We are also planting 200 trees at a health clinic in a village 3km from Titao. The experience there has been completely different. Issouf, the forestier, and I showed up to measure and mark the planting site and there were immediately 7 men who had run home to get there tools and wanted to help. When we finished marking the holes (I say "we" but I just stood around stupidly the whole time), the president of the community decision-making group said he would get people together that week to dig all of the holes. Fantastic!!

I had a discussion the other day at lunch with some men about the Peace Corps philosophy on development work. It turns out that our school needs a new classroom and so some the men at the table mentioned that the white girl at the table could pay for it. I explained that my job wasn't to give them money but to teach them how to solve these problems themselves since there won't always be a volunteer around...etc. They listened attentively and when I finished, they said "I understand and we'll learn that in the future but right now we need a classroom so if your family could pay for it, we'll put their names across the entrance." Time well spent. I think my next strategy will be WWOD: What Would Obama Do? Maybe coming from Barack, the message will be better understood.

Part 4: Zanzibar

We arrived back in Moshi from Ngorongoro after dark and went about repacking our bags once again for our departure the next morning for Zanzibar. The beach at last!! The trip to Zanzibar was in two parts: 8hr bus ride to Dar es Salaam where we'd spend the night meet up with our friends Kai and Janet, and then a 2hr ferry ride to the island the next day. The bus ride was mostly uneventful. I just want to mention the 2hr movie we watched because it was particularly awful. Here's the basic story: man cheats on his wife and hits both her and his girlfriend. Girlfriend gets pregnant so he starts being nicer to her and meaner to the wife. Girlfriend gives birth and man finds out it's not his kid so he goes back to his wife. They live happily together because she understands that he just wants to be a father! Terrible.

Zanzibar is amazing! You know those postcards of people sitting on a beach and it looks like paradise, it was here (or maybe Hawaii). We are spending 6 days in a town on the east coast called Paje. Our hotel is run by a fun Italian couple and is on the beach. The first few days were a haze of playing at the beach, lazing in hammocks, and sipping cocktails. All of the local rice dishes were cooked with coconut milk, so we had lots of curry with different meats in the sauce (octopus, king fish, etc). Unfortunately for Kai and Janet, the vegetarien options were a little more limited and so they embarked on a "vegetable curry tour of zanzibar".

We took a day trip to Jazoni Forest, the last protected remains of the forest that used to cover the whole island. This forest is famous for the Red Colobus monkeys that are only found on Zanzibar and the welcome center has a big sign about keeping your distance from the monkeys so you don't give them human diseases. However, once you enter the forest, you really don't have a choice because these little guys have no fear of humans and they are really friendly. They were running in between us and jumping around our heads hitting us with branches. As luck would have it, right as we entered the monkey haven, our camera ran out of space so we don't have many pictures of them. Our guide was really funny and talked nonstop the entire trip. He liked to do voices for all of the animals and loudly lament that it was too quiet in the forest. Luckily, the animals seemed used to his shouting and we still saw lots of cool forest creatures.

After 6 days of lazing at the beach, we travelled back to Stone Town, the major city on Zanzibar. Stone Town is fun because it is a tourist stop where local people are living so it doesn't feel quite as theme-parky as some of the other places we'd visited. It is surrounded on three sides by water so you can spend hours wandering the endless, narrow alleys and not get lost. It also turns out to be impossible to get a bad meal in this town.

We stayed at a hostel run by the Anglican Cathedral. The picture to the right is of a tangle of spider webs strung between two trees containing about 100 hand-sized spiders. This was just outside our room balcony. The Cathedral is actually a big tourist stop in town because below the hostel, there are holding chambers from the old slave trade and the cathedral alter is located where the old whipping post once stood. We took a spice tour our second day in town and drove to a spice plantation where you get to see all the plants and eat a lunch cooked with local spices. It was interesting to hear which spices are grown locally and which aren't (contrary to what they try to sell you in the shops). One of the highlights of Stone Town (for the carnivores in the group) was the night fish market. Every night, you could find a whole line of cooks selling freshly grilled fish, crab, lobster, shrimp, Zanzibar pizza (veggies cooked on an Indian tortilla), and freshly pressed sugar-cane juice. The market is normally found in a park by the water, but the park was under construction during our stay and moves every few nights to a new location so it took us a few nights to find it. Our last day in Stone Town, we visited a museum where they had an AIDS presentation put together by local kids. They explained that since the island wasn't hit as hard with HIV/AIDS, there is a much bigger stigma and misunderstanding by the people here and so the presentation was local kids and teens with AIDS telling their stories and asking local people to be more accepting. I was really touched by their courage and started crying which was really uncomfortable since we were immediately surrounded by pseudo-Masai people hassling us to come into their shops.

In order to get back to Moshi in one day (Dar didn't really impress us and we didn't want to spend the night there again), we decided to take the night ferry back. The night ferry leaves Zanzibar at 9pm and arrives in Dar at 6am. Thus, a ride that normally takes 2 hours is extended to 9 hours, the ticket price is cut in half, and you don't need a hotel room. When we arrived, we were escorted to the (mandatory) "VIP room" with couches and comfortable chairs, which seemed to be the room where they stick all the white people. I meant to find out why the trip took so long at night (do you sit in the harbor for a few hours?) but fell asleep right away instead only to be woken up around 2 by a German girl near us getting seasick. Poor girl. When we arrived in Dar, we headed to the bus station to catch the first bus to Moshi. The Dar bus station is full of faux-types, overflowing really. And what made it difficult was that I can't really understand what their strategy is. They follow you nonstop and are always trying to "help" and show you to the ticket office or the bus, but really they are just confusing you. How do you make money confusing people? When we arrived, we were led to the "ticket office" where a guy told us the 7am bus had left and the 7:30 bus was full. He even went to the trouble of looking at a fake passenger list. Finally, we were tired of him lying to us so we walked around and found the bus we wanted (the 7am) and hopped on (still being grabbed by our "guides").

Our last day in Moshi we finished up our shopping (Kilimanjaro coffee!) and walked around town one final time. It was sad to say goodbye to such a beautiful place, but I was also happy to get home and finally unpack.

Part 3: Safari

Since we got off the mountain a day early, we decided to do a 2-day safari before heading east to the beach. We arranged to spend one day at Lake Manyara park, only 3 hours from Moshi and famous for sightings of lions sleeping in trees, spend the night outside the park, and visit Ngorongoro Crater, famous for being jam-packed with animals, the second day.

And so, one day after finishing the climb, we hopped in a van (not really "hopped" since we were really sore from the downhill; more like "waddled") and headed to Lake Manyara. On the way to the park, we seemed to enter into a Disney-style themepark version of Tanzania. The only other people at the stops for gas or lunch were tourists decked out in their safari regalia (white safari shirts, cargo pants, big tan hats, and camera around the neck). It was unreal and would have definitely tainted the experience except that the drive itself was really beautiful and distracted me.


Lake Manyara park was a lot of fun. We popped up the roof on the van so that we could look through. Immediately, we ran into a group of monkeys hanging out on the side of the road and right after passing them we were brought to a stop by an elephant walking out of the trees right in front of us. Luckily, our driver had a little more self-control than the safari driver from Burkina and stayed calm so that after a few minutes of the elephant facing us, it got bored and walked off. Aside from lots of monkeys and baboons, we also stopped to see hippos, zebras, giraffes, warthogs, flamingos, and lots of antelope-like things. And then,...we saw them...lions sleeping in trees! There were two adult females and three cubs all sleeping in a tree not far off the road. It was really cool. Another cool sighting during our drive: 4 people that climbed Kili with us. We took pictures of each other; I think, mostly, because we were in safari-mode where you take a picture of everything and stop to look at it later.

Day 2: Ngorongoro Crater. We had a 1-hour drive from our hotel to the crater so we started early in order to get down into the crater before the animals got drowsy. Our driver was convinced that all animals were lazy. Anytime we stopped to look at an animal and it was just standing or laying, he would shake his head and say "lazy" (I can only wander what they must think about us as we drive by in cars). Currently, there are Masai people living around the rim and you can arrange to do a walking safari with them through the crater. However, despite the park brochure's boasts that they are balancing traditional ways of life with tourism, the park service is slowly kicking the Masai people out; it is pretty sad and made me feel more than a little guilty about my role as a tourist.

The crater isn't really that big, only 18km in diameter, which explains why so many people come here because it hosts tons of animals. We had wildebeasts (the big ones that killed Mufasa), water buffalo (we decided they looked Swedish), and zebras walking right next to the car all day. We stopped to watch a pride of lions sleeping in the grass and ate lunch next to a lake filled with hippos. All in all, it was amazing!!.