July 1, 2011

I have only been in Tanzania now for three days and it feels like so much longer. It is probably due to our three day journey to get here, but I am finally settled in the volunteer house! 

Yesterday morning we woke up at 3:30 AM and got ready to leave our hotel in Dar to come to Arusha. I took the LAST hot shower that I will most likely have in the next three months. It wasn’t even a good hot shower. Africa unfortunately does not get to know what water pressure actually feels like. So we packed up all of our luggage and headed out in the city of Dar at 5 AM when it was still pitch dark. This was slightly intimidating but the city was mostly still sleeping so there were very few people out. In Tanzania there is “Mzungu time” which means “White people time” and “Tanzanian Time” which means NO time. No one wears a watch or has clocks. People can be hours late for something and not even realize it. When meeting someone, you rarely give a specific time and if you do, they most likely will not show up at that time. Maybe I should have been born Tanzanian? This would fit in well with me! When you are trying to take transportation it is not as fun. Our bus was about 45 minutes late to leave so we didn’t head off until around 6 AM. But it was so nice because while we were standing there waiting on the bus in the complete darkness with hardly anyone around us, the call to prayer started sounding chanting somewhere off in the middle of the city but it could be heard from miles away. It was so beautiful to hear. Before we left our small bus stop, we stopped at the HUGE bus stop in Dar. Not exaggerating, there were at least 60 buses there waiting to leave town. Complete chaos. Drivers will hit you in this country and have no problem with it. They honk their horns incessantly. So these 60 huge buses were trying to line up in two rows in one parking lot with around 1000 people or more milling about looking for their bus. By the time everyone got on the bus it was about an hour later.

The bus ride was supposed to be eight hours long but ended up being twelve. We stopped a total of 3 times, with the last being an unexpected one. The first stop was a “bathroom break” but when we stepped off the bus we realized there was no building. The men lined up along the road facing the trees and the women walked in different directions out into the trees. We decided that we didn’t have to go all that badly after all. During the ride they gave us a free drink (mine a coke.. obviously) and Glucose crackers, which pretty much tasted like animal crackers. After five hours of driving we finally stopped at an outdoor market/barbecue, WITH a building labeled “toilet.” By this time I was about to pee my pants. So funny story... all they had were “squatters,” holes in the floor that are like toilets and that flush, only not. I took off my sun glasses, hung them on my shirt and proceeded to squat. As I was standing up my $40 sunglasses (in slow motion) fell off of my shirt and into the hole of the squatter. There was no rescuing them. Even though I am upset about the long gone aviators.. it is still a pretty funny story of my first ever squatting experience.

Next, our bus broke down. So we stood on the side of the road by a house for around an hour. Thankfully they were able to fix it! We arrived in Arusha around 5:30 PM and by the time we got to the house it was packed! Every Thursday night is Social Night and all the volunteers (even the ones at the homestays) meet at the house and they make us a VERY large meal. Lots of fruit, beans, rice, lots of vegetables, and two or three different types of meat. It was slightly overwhelming coming into the house with no sleep and meeting 50 plus people. Not going to lie, when I laid down to go to sleep, I was slightly homesick and I never get homesick. Before I went to bed I took my first of many, many, MANY freezing cold showers. You would think that in Africa where it is hot that this could be nice... it is NOT. The shower is in a room with a toilet and sink, no mirror and no shower curtain. In addition to the cold water there is one trickle of water that runs down from the shower head. Which makes it almost impossible to get washed off and rinse the shampoo out of your hair. Since there is no shower curtain, the bathroom floor is always soaked and always tainted black from the layers of dirt that run off of your body. Bathroom= disgusting. 

*I will put up pictures of the volunteer house soon! I forgot to take them*

This morning we woke up and had orientation, ate lunch, had a short Swahili lesson and then went on a 4-5 hour walking tour of the city/town. In town there is what are called “Dala dalas,” they had the same transportation system in Haiti, but they are vans that are 100-800 shillings one way to ride which is SO incredibly cheap, around 10-60 cents. People cram onto these buses like nothing you have ever seen. There are 14 seats yet sometimes 30+ people cram into one dala dala. There is no such thing as personal space in Tanzania. People are sitting on laps of strangers and some hang out of windows. INSANE. This makes getting off of the dala dala at your stop very hard to do. A girl here was telling us that last week she was on one and they wouldn’t let her off at her stop so she had to take it until the next person got off and walk back about 10 minutes. I am very nervous about these buses. They are color coded and all I know is that the yellow ones take me home. Or near home. From the closest bus stop it is ten minute walk to the volunteer house. 

There were 24 of us in here at this point. This picture does not do justice of how crowded it was! We were on laps!

It was so funny because in our dala dala they play music and as we were all crammed into this dala dala driving through Arusha... thousands of miles away, they played Justin Bieber! Not joking! We made many stops in town. We went to the ATM to take out money and at most ATM’s there are guards with big guns that guard them. People needed to get phones so we stopped at a Vodacom. They have a ShopRite in town and I bought a 1.5 L water bottle for about 50 cents. 

Dinner was a little rough for me. It was the same as lunch pretty much and consisted of plain noodles, beans and vegetables. With all this walking and eating plain food I could possibly be in better shape when I get home! Or not.. we shall see.