safari, in its entirety

Okay, the following series of entries is being posted late, due to a lack of internet on safari. I kept journaling while we traveled, and now that I'm in Munich, Germany (and Emily is in class all day today) and I've access to almost unlimited internet, I can actually get these words typed and posted! This is long, so you may want to read only one entry at a time. So, without further ado.


7 November 2008

Within two hours of our first day of safari, Douglas, one of our guides, posed in all seriousness the question "What makes the world beautiful?" We all pondered it for awhile. The answer "love" seemed like a cop-out. Molly answered "people," Whitney said "mountains," and Anna said "trees." I thought of youth (in a broad sense), but then I realised old is beautiful too. So my answer ended up being two answers: "time" and "contrast." Similarly, Douglas's answer was "diversity." When the next day we asked the same question of Ole Maria, a visiting Maasai man hired by Dorobo Safari Company to familiarise us with the area, his answer was "God." He recently converted to Lutheran but follows traditional Maasai beliefs too, and tends his cattle instead of going to church when he can't get his family members to tend his cattle for him.

The land we bounced through is beautiful in a stark, thorny sort of way. We're in giant jeeps we've taken to calling moon rovers because they'd dominate even lunar craters and valleys. On our first day we saw giraffes, ostriches, gazelle, impala, about 30 species of birds, and yes -- zebras. We each have to do a report on an African animal (like middle school, speech and all) and I chose zebras. I've been reading a lot about them in my free time. Did you know the Romans used to call them "hippotigris," from the Latin for horse and tiger, and used to conscript them to pull chariots in circus acts?

As we drove along, we passed lots of "bomas," little huddles of round mud-and-thatch huts built by the Maasai and Warusha peoples. It's incredibly surreal -- in our killer landrovers, binoculars around our necks and cameras in hand, we're passing by rural, traditional villages still inhabited by people who look exactly like Discovery Channel programmes -- and they're more excited to see us than you'd expect, given the legacy the British left behind. They shout "wazungu!" and come running to stand and wave or stand and stare. They're dressed in traditional red and purple or blue blankets, they often have empty gauge piercings and ceremonial scars on their faces, and their shoes (when they have them) are made out of tyre segments strapped together with leather cording.

Maasai measure their wealth in cattle. It is children's duty to herd and graze the cattle. Now that schools are becoming more common, children are less available to mind the cattle. Families compensate in a few ways: 1. Sending only some of their children to school and keeping the rest home to assist with housework and herding (it's technically illegal to keep children out of school, but it's still practiced); 2. sending the children part-time (some schools conduct morning and afternoon sessions); and 3. allowing children too young for school to mind the livestock. I've seen five-year-olds out in the bush alone, leaning on their sticks and watching the herd.

As we neared sunset, clouds started rolling in, threatening a rainstorm. Although nightfall didn't wait for us to make it to camp and pitch our tents at Oldonyo Sambu and neither did the lightning and thunder, the rain held off until we'd gotten all our tents pitched and had started cooking dinner. It deluged all night and most of the next day. It was like being back in Oregon, camping in the mountains or at the coast, except with completely different terrain. And, y'know, zebras.

We finally got to go trekking around in the grasslands when the rain let up after lunch. It was super muddy, but we got to see a lot of bugs and tons of animal poop. I can identify more kinds of African animal poop than actual animals. We're supposed to go for a (hopefully) drier hike tomorrow.

(Footnote: Thad Peterson, brother to Mike Peterson and father of Zach Peterson, is our head guide and biology teacher, and he's got a bit of Hobbit about him, and a lot of awesome.)



11 November 2008

We climbed a mountain this week. The way the mountain was shaped, it looked like it'd be a half-hour climb to reach the summit, but every time we got to the top, there was another higher peak just a little way off. So it ended up taking us a couple of hours. We got misted on top, too, which made the bugs go crazy -- which made us go crazy. It was an incredible view. Thad gave us a lecture up there. The catalog of places I've had class expands: hotel balcony, tree, ocean, top of a mountain...

Yesterday we packed up and drove to Tarangire National Park. I want to live in a Baobab tree. They're all over the place at Tarangire, and Kennedy told us a story (to open his report) about how when the world was new and all the animals and plants were trying to decide where to live, the Baobab tree couldn't make up its mind, so God picked it up and chucked it across the globe -- it spun top-over-bottom-over-top until it landed upside-down in the earth with its roots in the air, and that's why today Baobab trees look like they've been planted upside-down.

We saw pretty much the whole circle of life this week: first, a scattering of giraffe bones, some of which we hauled back to camp -- the pelvis would make a great toilet seat, and Sass is going to try and sneak the femur he spent two hours cleaning up through Customs; then a dead elephant reduced to bones and skin that we smelled before we saw; a ridiculous number of vultures and storks ravaging a fresh zebra carcass; lions mating; and finally baby animals in all flavours (elephants, baboons, giraffes, impalas...)



14 November 2008

We left behind Tarangire for the Nou Forest in the highlands. The drive was quite enjoyable, but also I'm weird in the way that I've got a peculiar fondness for long car rides despite my fear of automobile collisions and what I think is a mild allergy to benzine which inevitably affords me a nausea headache every time I spend longer than half an hour in a car. (My mom has carcolepsy -- I wonder if it's related.) We gained so much altitude that an hour or two before we parked we were all shivering and donning every piece of fabric we could reach. I started giving people massages just to keep blood circulating in my fingers.

The Nou Forest looks suspiciously like any forest in the Cascade Range. The prevailing theory amoungst group members is that one of our guides drugged us without our knowledge and transported us to Oregon or Northern California, because we're pretty sure we're not in Africa anymore, Toto. We're surrounded by ferns, moss, about a hundred species of mushrooms, trees that closely resemble oaks from a distance, even some evergreens. The only signs that we're still in Tanzania are the unfamiliar bird calls, the aardvark holes all over the place, the African dudes who occasionally maunder through camp, and the lines of siafu (Swahili for army ants) migrating progressively closer to our tents. (Siafu has become a verb in our group, as in, "I got siafued last night on my way back from the choo.")

Maybe it's just because we spent the last week and a half cruising around valley grasslands, but it's freakin' cold up here in the mountains! We've all been rocking the fleece and long underwear, and for the first time since we started safari I'm sleeping in my sleeping bag rather than just near it. A bunch of the students opted to sleep outside near the fire last night (it was a full moon), and at about one or two am they got deluged and dispersed shrieking into tents. (Their panicked retreat apparently woke D Camp, who was, understandably, far from pleased.) Several people crashed my tent, waking me just enough that I had the sense to shift my luggage to clear some space, and in the morning only Tosti was still there, and the extra sleeping gear had vanished alont with its owner or owners unknown.

Yesterday we hiked to an absolutely beautiful waterfall and it took me about ten seconds to strip off the majority of my clothing and stumble into the cold water. It took me hours to get properly dry again, but it was totally worth it. How often will I get the chance to get pummeled by a waterfall in Africa?

Today we hiked to a nearby village, where we got to tour a traditional Iraqw house built Hobbit-style into the side of a hill. Thad told us that the government forbids this type of house to be build nowadays -- its structure, which traps heat as well as years of smoke, is basically a festering tuberculosis pit. The architecture is a holdover from the era when Iraqw needed to protect their livestock from Maasai ilmorrani cattle raids, and the folks living here basically bribed a government official in order to keep living in their house. After five minutes of negotiations (Thad acting as Swahili translator), I got the elders who live in the house to agree to allowed me to take their photograph on the condition I send them a copy, which I will do my best to accomplish.

Following the mud hut tour, we were treated to a performance by village men (with women drumming) of a traditional dance normally reserved for weddings. Several of the boys in our group got in on it too, and wore themselves out jumping up and down and grunting. One of the drummer women had a baby tied to her chest, and I was amazed how he dozed through the drumming and shouting, and when he did finally wake up, she realigned him so he could nurse and continued drumming.

Then we met with several members of the village Council of Elders. Thad translated our questions and their answers. I took notes for the first half, but during the Swahili-heavy second half I gave up on the academics and instead sketched one of the elders in the corner of my notes. At the end, one of the lady elders, who'd apparently caught on to what I might've been doing, took my notebook from me, and, laughing, paraded my drawing around to half the village. I can't be sure, but I think they were pleased. (Thad later confirmed that indeed they were.)



17 November 2008

The Hadza are fabulous hunter-gatherers who speak in clicks and live one day at a time. We're staying in Yaida Valley, Hadza homeland, and my observation about the parabolic properties of the awesomeness of this trip as related to time holds frim. Despite battling the environment - sarms of buggs, African savannah heat, thorns on virtually every plant -- Yaida Valley is tons of fun so far.

At our first campsite, a giant baobab tree swelled up out of the centre of our boundaries. A couple of the Hadza dudes working for Dorobo chiseled hand- and foothold pegs and beat them into the trunk, which made climbing the tree much easier and marginally safer. I've never really been shy about heights or attempting to freestyle scale nature. But monkeying up the baobab was actually kind of terrifying -- partly because its bark is so smooth and it's just so huge, and partly because of the knowledge that should one of us slip and fall, we're kilometers away from medical facilities. Fortunately, I report no casualties.

On Sunday, the Hadza took us hunter-gathering. We spent the morning digging up roots we were told were called 'ekwa -- that apostrophe signifies a certain flat-sounding click. (There are at least four different kinds of clicks in Hadza language, probably more.) We roasted the roots on the fire and, after peeling off the skin, at them sugarcane style, spitting out the fibrous remnants. They tasted a lot like raw potatoes, maybe a bit of jicama flavour too. We started the fire with a hard stick, a soft piece of wood, and some dry grass. I helped -- it was very boyscouts. The smoking sawdust I helped to produce (pre-fire) was used by the Hadza to light their cigarettes. They seem to all be extremely addicted to tobacco. Thad told us that in exchange for their help, one of the demands of the Hadza is a certain amount of raw tobacco, which they roll into cigarettes using bits of old newspaper as wrappers.

We also ate baobab fruit and a couple of kinds of weird local berries. The Hadza are very into sharing -- everything they kill or gather is shared with everyone in the "village" (the quote marks because I use the term loosely -- there is a lot of mobility and flexibility in Hadza communities) along with any visitors or other people in the vicinity. Or us, since we're their pet wazungu for a week.

Back at camp, we made arrows -- with a lot of help, since none of us is all that skilled at straightening tree limbs using knives, fire, and our teeth -- and learned how to do Hadza-style beading. The beading string was made out of bark the Hadza women peeled apart with their teeth and twisted together. I got a pretty bracelet in blues and white made from some of the beads I'd brought to give gifts. By the last section of the bracelet I'd finally figured out how to do the tricky middle bits. After bracelet-making and arrow-straightening-and-fletching, we borrowed one of the Hadza's bow and practiced hunting an obligingly stationary cardboard box.

Today we hiked across the valley floor to get to our next campsite. We were all packed up and on the road by 8am, and stopped for lunch at the base of the ridge around noon. We could, at that point, choose to continue uphill in the sun on foot for another hour and a half, or we could wimp out and ride in the jeep. Everyone chose to continue walking except for Anna Courtney, Molly, and me. And about ten of the Hadza women who'd chosen to accompany us across the valley.

It was the most memorable non-safari-animal-focused jeep ride of the trip. The Hadza woman sitting next to me (ditto for the one sitting next to Anna) took it upon herself to protect me from all the potential acacia branches along the edges of the road. Every time we approached a tree that looked like it might be expansive enough to penetrate the open jeep sides, she would seize my head and force me face-first into her lap, shouting at me in a combination of Swahili and her indigenous click-laden language. Whenever she stopped paying close attention to the approaching acacia threats, the other nine women in the truck would shout at her and she'd suddenly grab me again and I'd find my head buried in her lap again. All in all, it was a pretty funny ride. I spent a good portion of the ride laughing into her skirt.



26 November 2008

On our last full day with the Hadza, we woke up eeeearly to go hunting in small groups. That really means two Hadza dudes with four or five students bumbling along behind them watching them do their thang and trying not to get in the way. In my group, we mostly just decimated some hives of wild bees and ate a lot of honey, honeycomb, nectar, pollen, and bee larvae. Our Hadza dudes would first find a hive, then build a fire, smoke the bees out, and just stick their hands in the hole and rip off huge chunks of honeycomb with no regard whatsoever for the wellfare of the hive. These guys are used to stings, so even though we were a little concerned that one of our Hadza men's right hand had swollen to three times its normal size, he didn't seem bothered at all. When we finished eating the entire hive, the Hadza dudes washed their hands by using a chunk of full honeycomb as soap and dirt as water. It was completely ridiculous. (Later we found a shallow puddle of rainwater collected on a rock that they used to finish the job.)

Our group didn't end up using bows and arrows (although our Hadza dudes carried them dutifully all morning), but two of the other groups shot rock hyrax, which they brought back to camp. Hyrax are a small mammal that look for all the world like a furry brown rodent -- somewhere between gopher and nutria -- but are actually most closely related to elephants and hippos. The dead Hyrax were thrown on the fire (quite literally), and once all the hair had burned off, the Hadza women pulled it out of the flames, sliced it open, and parceled out bits of hyrax meat to the whole Hadza group. I think a couple of the students might've gotten to try a piece too. One of the hyrax was pregnant, and the fetus was roasted and eaten as well.

After a day drive through Ngorongoro Crater (which is, like most things named Crater, actually a caldera, and was full of animals very used to multi-headed safari vans), we drove across the reserve and stopped briefly at a place called Shifting Sands. It was completely barren, a dry, cracked desert with absolutely nothing growing, but rising up inexplicably out of the middle of it was a dune of black sand. It was eerie. This pile of sand, as indicated by the markers stuck into the ground 25 meters away, slinks around over time so that it's in a different location every year. We climbed up on it and found dead frogs, dung beetles, and other similar small creatures that looked like they'd been visited by a vampire -- they were perfectly preserved, but sucked dry and crisped. Did I mention the place was eerie?

Our camp was surrounded by huge rounded rock formations called kopjes (pronounced "ko-pees" from the German word Kopf, meaning head). We climbed all over them, chasing rock agama lizards (males are bright blue with a red head -- we called them Barack Obama lizards because of the rhyming names) and watching the lightning tearing up the sky.

The best part of the Serengeti adventuring was when we went on a night ride. We took a giant spotlight and terrified the local nightlife -- impalas, zebras, gazelles. We chased an agitated porcupine until it got so tired it started smacking into trees and rocks with its spiny skirt all flared out. We also chased some spring hares, which are not rabbit-like at all, but are more like a cross between a kangaroo and a chihuahua. They're in the running for cutest African animal. The other truck saw bush babies, but I still haven't seen any. I've seen pictures only.

We're in Maasai country preparing for our homestays. I'm actually getting really excited about it -- baby cows and baby people! The flies are unbearable here -- I think I hate them even more than the no-sting jellies. They don't bite, they just swarm persistently.



And so ends my journal entries. But, since I never wrote (pen-and-paper style) about my Maasai homestay, it ought to be done too.


Molly accidentally invented the term "bomestay" in reference to our homestays at the Maasai bomas. On Thanksgiving, we were handed walking sticks and we trekked from our campsite to the nearby school football field, where a whole line of host mothers were waiting for us. After a bit of ceremonial shouting and weaving about, the mothers were allowed to rush us. The woman who grabbed my stick and led me off to her boma was one of the oldest mothers there -- many of them were around our age, some even younger. I got really lucky: my mother (or "yeyo," which is the Maa word for mother) spoke Swahili fairly well, and so did my older siblings. It was a really good opportunity for me to get my Swahili back up to par just in time for our Swahili oral exam in a week.

Maasai houses are small, dark, and smokey. The only light comes from the fire, which is kept going more or less constantly, and one or two tiny windows punched through the mud-and-dung walls. I had to repeatedly choose between sitting inside in the dark crying and coughing from all the smoke or sitting outside being driven absolutely mad by the torrents of flies. It's especially obnoxious when the flies got caught between my glasses and my eyes, or would crawl up the insides of my trousers and I'd suddenly feel them buzzing around at mid-thigh level.

I found out from my host sister Tikako (who was 14 and was great about speaking in slow, basic Swahili) that yeyo (whose name is Loorkinyai -- try to pronounce that!) was 38 and baba (father, who resembled Watto from Star Wars Episode 1) was 80. No kidding. Eighty. Oh, and yeyo had a three-month-old. Draw what conclusions you will. In addition to a mother and a father and Tikako and Daniel (the baby), I also had an ilmorrani brother who was rarely around, a 12-year-old brother who was usually out herding, a seven-year-old sister named Stella, and a three-year-old sister named Ndini. I loved playing with the little girls and their baby brother.

I helped out with regular household chores like washing dishes, cutting down trees to build fences or to be used as firewood, fetching water and firewood on my head, sweeping, and putting the little animals in their bedrooms at night. The goats and sheep lived in a closet next to my bed, and the calves had their own room in the house too. Only the adult cows sleep in a corral at night. Every evening before putting the animals away, I got to try to milk a cow. I was, predictably, very bad at it, but trying was fun. Even when I actually succeeded in getting milk out of the cow's udder, I'd more often than not completely miss the mouth of the calabash I was supposed to be milking into, since I was aiming for a surface area about the size of a penny. My favourite chore was cleaning out the calabashes: I would choose a burning stick from the fire and drop it, flaming and smoking, into the calabash, then shake the heck out of it until the inside of the calabash was totally coated in charcoal. Remove stick, place in fire. Repeat process 25 times. Voila, clean calabash! It's no wonder Maasai milk tastes so smokey.

I drank a lot of chai in the three days we stayed with the Maasai. I don't think I even drank water, they gave me so much chai. Also, I was trying to take in as little liquids as possible, since the bathroom situation was basically "find a spot out in the trees or in the cow corral and shoo the curious children away if you'd like privacy." I got it down to an exact three times a day: morning, afternoon, and right before bed. It's no wonder my kidneys hate me.

One morning, Yeyo led me down to the edge of the forest where a whole herd of cows were being forced, one at a time, through a passageway that dropped into a deep trough of muddy water. Each cow would fall in, be submerged completely for a second, then come up blowing snot everywhere and walk up and out of the water via ramp leading into a corral. I didn't really understand what was going on at the time, and only later did I find out that the muddy water was a treatment bath -- it was laced with some kind of medication or pesticides or something intended to keep the herd healthy.

I slept on a cowhide lashed to a stick frame, which I shared with Tikako and I think Stella too. As a consequence, all of the possessions that I took to the bomestay smelled like cowhide, smoke, and petting zoo until I got laundry done in Germany. It was actually less comfortable than anything else I've slept on in East Africa -- punctured thermarest, rocks, rope beds, boats, luggage in the back of the jeep, airplanes -- okay, maybe not airplanes. But hey, it was only for three nights. Three nights that were so hot that by the second night I didn't even bother to get out my sleeping bag, just pb&jed myself between two kangas.

The children loved to have their photos taken, especially wearing my bandana and glasses (which they had to hold on to their faces with one hand because their faces were so little), and loved seeing the preview image on the screen on the back of the camera. They took to following me around all the time saying, "Piga picha!" ("Take a picture!") and I kept having to say, "Basi picha sasa. Nitapiga picha baadaye." ("Enough pictures right now. I'll take pictures later.") I also gave each of them a pen as a gift and a piece of lined paper ripped out of my notebook, and they were delighted. Tikako proceeded to write out a whole series of vowel-based syllables and started teaching Stella how to read them. Later, I folded each of them an origami crane, and tried to explain in my limite Swahili that it was a bird, not a plane -- the Swahili word ndege means both bird and plane.

Translators came round several times a day to check on us and eat whatever food our host parents would hand them. The translators were all secondary-school kids who were learning English in class. Fortunately, they were all proficient in Swahili, so I could revert to rudimentary Swahili when they didn't understand my English (which was most of the time).

Before I left, Yeyo (and her sister-wife who lived in the closest house, and whose children I spent a lot of time entertaining too) decked me out in Maasai necklaces and bracelets and earrings that they'd made. I promised to send them via post in January some of the photos I'd taken, and they were very excited about that. Tikako said she would put them in an album, and she's really excited about the idea.

At the end of the Maasai bomestay, we packed up our camp and loaded back up into the jeeps to drive to Arusha and civilisation. It took us two days to get from our location on the Serengeti (close to the border of Kenya and Tanzania) to Arusha -- we spent one night at Lake Naitron. The crescent moon was aligned with a couple of planets that evening so that it looked like the sky had a creepy smiley face. Also, I saw fireflies for the first time in my life! In the morning before our last drive, we woke up extra early, packed quickly, and hiked up the river to a waterfall. Leanora, Rachel, Collins and I climbed up the waterfall and jumped off it -- it was little and the pool it poured into was deep enough. After we hiked out, we got to stop and watch the flamingoes for awhile before loading up in the jeeps for our six hour drive to Arusha. (As usual, I slept in the boot on top of all the luggage, bouncing around uncomfortably because of all the potholes and rocks in the unfinished roads.)

And that should have gotten you sufficiently caught up to the point where we re-entered civilisation and stayed in that super-schmancy hotel where they turned down our beds and brought us roomservice cappuccinos.

future tense

We're back in civilisation and it's really really really exciting. An unreasonable number of us came down with sensory overload headaches on our first day back in Arusha. We're put up in the swankiest hotel I've ever been in -- it's probably like a four star, and it's ridiculous. At dinner, one of the waiters tucked my chair in for me. The staff also come around to our rooms to do things like "turn down the bed" for us, and bring us all manner of obscenely unnecessary things like jars of complimentary shoe polish. Internet is complimentary, and I'm reveling in the speed with which I can browse. Laundry services are so expensive that I opted to wash all of my clothes (except for an extremely filthy pair of trousers, which I sent to be washed for a sum of $2 or so) in the sink, which took me two hours. They still smell vaguely but uncomfortably like smoke and petting zoo. Maybe I'll hire them washed in Riruta Satellite -- that's what my host family did for laundry, and it worked out quite well.

I need to study for my Swahili oral exam (which is tomorrow morning), and figure out how I'm getting from Arusha to Riruta Satellite on Friday. Oh, and I need to make sandals out of motorbike tyres, Tanzania style, since we've just gotten the materials finally.

Very soon I'll meet up with my parents and go on ANOTHER week of safari. Wild. Maybe this time I'll get to see a leopard -- the only animal I really hoped to see but didn't. (On our last travel day, we saw a cheetah -- from a distance, but still, a cheetah!)

Here's my class schedule for next semester, after a bit of confusion and haggling:

Qualitative Research Methods (SOAN) - TTh 9:40-11:10
Utopias/Distopias (LIT) - TTh 1:50-3:20
Gender in a Cross-Cultural Perspective (GEND) - WF 11:30-1
Intro to Judaism (REL) - MWF 9:10-10:10

Waitlisted:
Yoga - MW 1:50-2:50

And I've no idea where I'll be living on campus.

UPDATE: I'll be living in Stewart with a roommate from Japan (again).

safari!

We've unexpectedly been allowed brief internet access! I'm keeping this extremely short as there's a line of students waiting for a chance at the computers.

Safari just gets awesomer and awesomer. We've been in Oldonyo Sambu, then Tarangire National Park, then Nou Forest, then Yaida Valley, and now we're heading to Ngorogoro Crater and the Serengeti. Highlights included zillions of birds, lions mating!, collecting wild honey with the Hadza (Hunter-Gatherers who are totally wicked -- they also taught us how to do beadwork and make arrows), sleeping on rocks under the stars, and having biology and anthropology lessons all over Tanzania.

We're all so excited that Obama won the elections! We all woke up at 4am to watch the unfolding of the election results, and we huddled together on Thad's floor with mugs of tea and coffee in hand to get us through the sunrise. It was so great.

More in a month or so!

drowning five-armed monkeys

One day during Free Travel Week we learned how to cook Swahili food at Langi Langi restaurant. We made the absolute best coconut curry I've ever had -- the whole meal was probably the food highlight of East Africa. When I say we learned how to cook, I really mean we stood awkwardly in the way in the kitchen while Sele, the cook and hotel manager, bounced around stirring things and speaking in an affected Cockney accent. We went back to Langi Langi restaurant a few nights later because it was so good, and Sele gave us a complimentary chocolate cake with ice cream.

At the almost end of the week we moved out of Baraka. We sent all our luggage over in a hired van-taxi, then walked/waded along the beach to reach Kendwa. At around 3pm, Sele came kayaking up from Nungwi. We hailed him and he pulled in and spent a four hours hanging out on the beach with us. We tried to convince him to come visit us in Portland sometime in future.

We spent the last night in Kendwa during a power outage in an okay room that smelled weakly though distinctly of latrine. Early the next morning the Dorobo Safari team picked us up. The Petersons turned out to be (at this juncture) one of the "Peterson brothers" and his nephew. They kinda resemble Han Solo and Luke Skywalker (or, if Luke Skywalker and Marty McFly fused into one 25-year-old with an unplaceable accent), which is a source of great amusement for me. We took a couple of dhows ("dao" in Swahili) across the ocean to get to the mainland. Dhows, or the one I was on, are really not designed for comfortable ferrying. We just put all our gear in the bottom and perched wherever we could around the edges. (Over the course of the week we got real familiar with these two boats, since we took them out everyday to get to the coral reef.)

A pod of dolphins joined us for a few shining minutes, and we saw tons of flying fish leaping all over the place. Other than that, it was a pretty uneventful four hours. I fell asleep curled up in a little ball (I'm good at falling asleep almost anywhere in almost any position -- it's a skill I'm nurturing a lot on this trip) to avoid the threat of potential seasickness and, I awoke as the sailors were cutting the engine in favour of hoisting the sail. I suffered only a minor sunburn on the part of my tummy my t-shirt wasn't covering and an indent in the back of my head due to unwisely using an anchor as a pillow. We waded to shore in bellybutton-high water, portering all our giant backpacks over our heads. I was stuck with boat-head for the rest of the day (boat-head being the maritime equivalent to airplane-head), but a solid night's sleep kicked it pretty thoroughly.

Pembe Abwe (which is sort of Swahili for bay shaped like horns) was incredible. This trip is structured so that it continually gets more and more awesome. Just when you think you're at the zenith of awesome saturation, you go somewhere that outranks it. We all stayed in "bandas," A-frame structures built of wood, palm fronds, and screens that looked right out onto the ocean. We had class and meals in a freakin' tree. I think it's one of those giant Rafiki trees (baobab), but it had a sort of treehouse/balcony/raincover thing built all around it. Shortly after eating lunch that first day, a gentle storm blew through, and Anna, Rachel, Whitney and I sat on our porch for a few hours enjoying the drizzle and the wind. It was kinda like being back in Portland, except about 20 degrees warmer, and, y'know, with palm trees and a bathwater-warm ocean.

The next day we had our first biology lecture, which the entire week seldom got more complicated than "animals and plants live in places called habitats." (Okay, I exaggerate. But not much.) The bio component of this programme is gonna be easier than ramen, I can feel it. After the lecture, we went tromping around on the exposed intertidal zone (it was neap tide because it was new moon). The coolest find was an octopus, but even the coral, sponges, hydras, and urchins were neat. I carried around a brittle star for awhile -- they're spiney-lookin' stars that wave their limbs around like drowning five-armed monkeys. We went snorkeling right before lunch, too. Some of the students are new to snorkeling, so it was an optional practice session, but I got in on it because we only got a week of coastal stuff, then it'd be off into the Serengeti, hours away from the ability to chase fish.

The next day was without a doubt the most miserable snorkeling of my entire life for one two-syllable reason: Jellies. Millions and zillions of jellies. I've never had so much animosity for one aquatic life form before. We had to swim through a wall of them to get from the boat to the reef, and at first we thought they were all comb jellies, which don't actually sting. But no, interspersed amoung comb jelly legions were a variety armed with a mild but incredibly obnoxious sting. After a few of those suckers kissed my arms, I hightailed it back to the boat so fast I mauled one of my knees on the ladder. I was determined to spend all of free snorkel (half an hour) enjoying the reef from the safety of the boat, but then some of the snorkelers discovered that the jellies were rare over the reef itself -- we just had to suck it up and fight through a ten meter thick barricade of jellies to get there. So I was back in the water. Once I'd made it to the reef, I saw all sorts of cool things: lionfish, something that may have been an octopus or a bizarre-shaped fish hunkered down under a ledge, huge anemones, angelfish, butterfly fish...

And then the obligatory guided snorkel, which took us to a part of the reef plentiful with jellies. Not a wall of them, but still way more than it was comfortable to swim through. While Kolombo pointed out snappers and wrasse, I was busy trying to avoid the stinging jellies, having no idea which ones stung of the three or four non-comb-jelly species abundant in the vicinity. We all got jelly stings, and later, back on the boat, we all swapped jelly rash locations, trying to outdo each other on the worst or most awkward places we'd been loved by those nasties. We did see a couple of sea turtles, which was neat, but that guided hour was not worth the uncomfortableness of sharing swimming space with thousands of jellies. Just about the only thing keeping most of us in the water (I felt particularly bad for the newbie snorkelers) was the knowledge that reef ecology is a quarter of our biology grade.

The snorkeling was quite improved by the disappearance of the jellies by the second day. There were always a few lingering every time we went out all week, but never in droves the way they were that first day. After our learning-how-to-identify-stuff period, we performed a Reef Check on a transect of the coral reef to collect scientific data on how many of certain species are living there. The data is submitted to a global Reef Check project to be analysed by unknown scientists interested in global trends of reef ecosystems. I was on Team Rock (ie, substrate), so my job was to drop a plumb bob every 50 centimeters and record what it landed on. Having a primarily tactile task worked well, given that without glasses (or contacts or a prescription mask) my vision is restricted to about five feet in front of my face. So instead of identifying fish zipping past or lobsters hiding in crevices, I got to dive and poke stuff, then make hand signals at Anna, who wrote it down. We had a whole nonverbal code for the seven or eight types of substrate we could identify.

The written final was easy, as anticipated (What's the importance of mangrove forests? How does the moon influence the tides?) and afterwards we had a nostalgic 90s pop dance party in the top of the tree with such classics as NSYNC and Savage Garden.

Starting on Hallowe'en, I slept on the porch every night. It was a bit damp (due to regular rainstorms at about 3am) but otherwise quite enjoyable. The sunrise every morning was stellar. I went to bed very early every night, since there wasn't much to do after the sun went down. Many of the students got really into daily football (soccer for all you Americans) games on the beach right before sunset, which I occasionally watched from the sidelines.

We took a longer-than-eight-hour bus ride to Arusha yesterday. At one point we had to take a ferry across a river that could've qualified as a large puddle, but there was no bridge so the ferry was the only option. We drove by Kilimanjaro and it's beauuuutiful. I wish I had enough time and money to climb it with the other seven or eight students who plan to at the end of the trip, but a week in Germany will be fabulous too.

We're currently staying at a sort of campground that belongs to Dorobo Safari (the Petersons basically own Africa. We're convinced.). It's two students per tent, though we could easily fit three or even four. And so ends my non-campfire-smoke smell. We leave for the Serengeti tomorrow morning. It's all tents and campfire smoke and holes dug in the ground from now until December.

This is my absolute last entry, at least for a month. We return to Arusha on 4 December and I'll be taking a bus from there to Nairobi early the next morning. There is a distant possibility that I may find a cyber cafe sometime between Nairobi and Portland, but don't count on it. That said, farewell! Or as we say in Swahili, kwaherini!

utensils are superfluous

For 20,000 shillings each (less than $20 USD) we got a sunset boat ride, including snorkeling, live music (drums, guitars, singing), dancing, two drinks apiece, and a dinner afterwards of wali (rice), samaki (fish -- kingfish, to be specific), and saladi. Normally a dinner at one of the touristy restaurants nearby is at least 10,000 shillings and not nearly so filling. We ate with our hands because utensils are superfluous anyway. The whole evening was great all around.

My rash has cleared up a lot, so hopefully I won't have to track down a daktari (doctor) at all. A few of the girls left for Stone Town this morning because we received a phone call from Moody yesterday telling us his sister had just died. She'd been in hospital with malaria, and, from what I gather, her family didn't have enough money for proper treatment. We feel a little guilty, because Moody was taking us to Nungwi instead of with his sister in hospital yesterday when she died.

On a happier note, we're taking a daytrip to Kendwa probably tomorrow. You can walk there at low tide from Nungwi, but it's much more deserted and the food is cheaper. Should be lovely. Oh, the tropics.

liberal swallows

We sardined twelve girls and all our luggage into a vehicle the size of a large matatu. It was a pretty uncomfortable ride, but it was an accomplishment that we all fit in it at all. We'd chartered it to carry us to Nungwi for our week of free travel. Anja made the arrangements through our new local friend, a teenage boy named Moody (yes, sometimes we called him Mad Eye) who, like most boys everywhere, developed a crush on her. It only cost us about $5 USD each, too. We got stopped by cops at a checkpoint, and I think our conductor had to pay a bribe to pass. In East Africa, a police uniform enables you to extort cash from everyone.

In an hour we arrived in Nungwi, moved all our luggage into our rooms (pretending to be less people than we actually were, since technically we'd only paid for eight of us and were slipping in four under the radar by sleeping two to a bed), and then we went exploring. We'd only booked Safina bungalow for one night, so we needed to find some alternate accommodations for the remainder of our stay. After much haggling with bungalow managers and discussion amoungst ourselves, we agreed on a bungalow called Baraka. It's costing us less than $15 USD a head per night, breakfast included. Some of us are two to a bed, but we're not sneaking it, and we don't mind snuggling. The place is right on the beach, lushly landscaped, and has lots of hangout spots. Zanzibar during the tourist off season is terrific.

We played all day on the beach, reading, photosynthesising, footballing, sandcastle building, and swimming in what we discovered (to our dismay) to be jellyfish infested waters. And getting tremendously sundburned, despite repeated applications of sunscrean. Ironically, the other half our classmates ended up in Nungwi too, boarding at a neighbouring bungalow. The boys (plus Courtney) had decided that the town they'd gone to initially was too expensive, so they uprooted and relocated. Not to knock the boys, but we'd really been looking forward to being a smaller group for a little while. We'll get plenty of each other when we're all together on safari next week. About three of the boys (who are not with the "boys group") rented bikes and are circumnavigating the island during free week.

Rachel is sick with something that might be strep or a particularly vicious sinus infection. Adam has strep (he informed me ten minutes ago when we walked into the same cyber cafe as me), and Nora's been harbouring a nasty cold for a week, which has also been passed around to several other students within the last week. Yesterday Nora and Rachel went to a clinic in Nungwi. Here's something that'll make you wary of the medical system here: they didn't bother with getting checked for what they might be afflicted with, they just marched up to the chemist (pharmacist) counter demanding amoccicilin, which they were granted sans fuss.

I've got a mysterious and very itchy rash attacking my skin. It started at my elbows yesterday morning and at first I thought it was flea bites because there were fleas in the mattresses at our previous hotel in Stone Town, but it's since spread to my feet, legs, arms, hands, and the backs of my upper thighs, so it's probably some weird tropical virus that manifests itself in the form of hives. The rash has not improved, despite my liberal swallows of benadryl and applications of cortisone. I've no other symptoms, I'm not allergic to anything that I know of, and the clinics in Nungwi we visited this morning seem to lack doctors entirely (although the twentysomething in jeans and a polo suggested he could administer a cortisone shot, which I promptly refused). The best I could do was buy a tube of antihistamine cream at one of the clinics. If this rash doesn't start clearing up by tomorrow morning, Nora and I will catch a matatu to Stone Town, which is the only place on the whole island with a hospital.

Inexplicably, East Africa is making me girlier. The coolest thing to wear (recall that it's hotter than Natalie Portman here) is a skirt or a kanga tied into a backless dress, so those are the things I've been dawning every morning. We all agreed to go tourist style during our week of free travel, because while the hijab/burka/headcovering thingy was fun and cultural, it was also like wearing a cloth sauna on your head. Not conducive to warding off heat stroke, though it does help with the mosquitoes.

victory lap

We've just finished our History of East Africa final exam, turned in the last of our Culture & Religion of East Africa class essays, and we're freeeeee! There will be celebrations tonight! (I rocked the exam essays, by the way. I definitely used the simile of "dessert" in reference to the scramble for Africa. Yes indeed.)

We also sent off 21 ballots yesterday. 21 out of 25 potential ballots is a phenomenal turnout. It cost us about 80 bucks USD to send the DHL package, but god it's worth it. At the DHL office I met the dude who's the point person for the Obama campaign in Zanzibar. He's a cool cat. He's got a speech all prepared for when Obama wins, and he told us how there'll be a victory lap march around the streets of Stone Town, which he will lead. He also plans to run for president of Tanzania when he's a little older -- I'd place him mid-twenties, so he probably ought to garner a little more political experience first. Oh, and they were selling these wicked Obama kangas that said Yes We Can all around the edges, but since I'd just forked out 85,000+ shillings to send a frackin envelope to the US, I didn't exactly have cash to spare on frivolities like Obama kangas, however cool they might be. The moral of the story is: VOTE! We did it for $5 apiece from halfway across the world, so you have no excuse not to if you're 18 or above!

Yesterday was Cara's birthday, so we threw her a sort of surprise party -- namely, we all showed up to Amore Mio (the amazing Italian restaurant from our first day in Stone Town) for dessert, then waited around for Kowalski to lead her there under the semi-false pretense of a scoop of icecream. D Sperls bought us two cakes to share (lemon and chocolate) and three scoops of icecream each. A bunch of us went out to dinner with Cara too -- I got a traditional Swahili dish of kingfish and plantanes that was incredible enough to warrant a blog entry mention.

We're starting our week of Free Travel tomorrow. A bunch of the girls (me included) are traveling to Nungwi, the northern tip of Zanzibar, which is packed with inexpensive bungalows and lovely beaches. Should be good fun. I'll try to limit my debauchery. The promise to come back alive still stands.

I posted a few (not lots, so don't get too excited) photos to my flickr, so if you wanna see me with a decapitated chicken or thrilled to pieces on top of a camel, go find the proper link on your righthand sidebar. I don't have the right plugins on these computers to be able to rotate the sideways pictures... sorry about that!

blender impression

This past week qualifies pretty solidly as the single most surreal four days of my life. The boat ride alone should've been an omen of what was to come.

At 7:30pm our bus disgorged us near the Zanzibar wharf. We were herded in the dark through a cyclone fence as thousands of people milled around. Like mosquitoes. But, you know, bigger and less obnoxious. On the other side of the fence, it was straight up like that scene out of Middlesex where all the islanders are panicking because the whole place has gone up in flames and everyone's shoving each other trying to board the boats (except the island was not on fire in our case) -- it was like mad immigration scramble crossed with rush hour in a Tokyo train station, but in the dark and with Tanzanians, who aren't real fussy about personal space. Once we actually all made it onto the ship (quite a feat itself), we passed the non-first-class section, which was basically just a huge empty room packed with families fleeing to Pemba scattered all over the floor. It looked like something out of wartime photographs of refugee camps.

We had been told we'd be cruising first class in a cabin containing approximately 60 bunks. We did not have bunks. We had chairs. Sort of like ghetto versions of highly abused airplane seats. The first-class cabin was sealed and the AC was on, which was nice, if a bit exclusionist. Passengers started claiming floorspace in the aisles -- I'm unclear as to whether the people lacked seats (like if more were allowed past the doorguard than there were seats) or if they just preferred horizontal floor to vertical chairs. I parked myself in my designated seat and resigned myself to an uncomfortable, brief night. When I woke up at insane o'clock am, it was hot and humid in our cabin and the lights were still on. D Camp was awake, as you'd expect an experienced naval officer on a dangerously overcrowded boat tanking through foreign waters to be. He was not pleased with the situation -- about half an hour before docking, our cabin's windows and doors were sealed, the only exit was padlocked from the outside, and the AC was shut off. Two hundred people don't really need air exchange or escape routes anyway.

Lewis & Clark will not be using this transport method in future. Just about the first thing D Camp did when the level of sketch exceeded his threshold was to book a flight for all of us for our return trip to Zanzibar. He was actually pretty livid that we'd been advised to travel on this ferry at all.

Before meeting our Swahili host families, we got a tour of a spice plantation (for lack of a better word) on Pemba. We were shown about 30 difference spices and agricultural goods as we maundered through the forest, from henna plants to clove trees. WE got to sample a lot of the edible bits. When we sat down at some benches for fresh coconut and ndizi sukari (sugar bananas), I thought we were done with the tour, but no, that was only the halfway point! We greeted another 20 or 30 useful growing things before boarding the bus again. It was tight.

When we got to Tumbe, the village we'd be doing our homestays at, we were paired up with our families. The headmaster of the secondary did the list, and he definitely referred to each of us as "stranger" and our designated host sibling as our "native," which was pretty funny. My name was called as being assigned to the chief's home. Whoa! Also, I was publicly informed that I was lucky because I'd been assigned to a boy (as opposed to a host sister). I do believe I made a face at the proclamation. My host brother was friendly, and he helped me carry the giant water bottles D Sperling had hooked us up with to his house.

My family was huge! Mama was a few years younger than my mom and dad, but the children ranged in age from around 25 to a one-and-a-half year old. I think mama averaged a kid ever 18 months or so. There were at least 10 kids who belonged to the household -- probably closer to 15. It was kinda hard to work out who lived where, since all the kids run wild inside and outside every house. Most of them had difficult-to-remember names, too. My main host brother (my "native") had a name that sounded like a cross between a cough and a sneeze. The closest I can come to spelling it is Hyahye. The easiest name was Amina, and the baby was Zainabu. She had the best ears in the world -- I will henceforth refer to her as Airplane Ears -- and the quickest pout lip I've ever seen. She cried when she was bored, which was often. (Incidentally, it's also the first place I've been in East Africa where people actually have trouble with my name -- I got called Aisha a lot, which makes sense seeing as how Aisha was one of Muhammed's wives and is a more familiar name to Muslims than Maisha is.) On the second day, my family spent an hour trying to teach me everyone's names, then quizzing me throughout the day. The hardest was later that evening when we were all sitting around outside in the moonlight. I tried to explain in Swahili that the name game was hard because I can't see in the dark, but they weren't buying it, so I could only go by sizes as a clue to which kid belonged to which name.

Even though it was the chief's house, it was a simple structure of concrete and mud with an open (unroofed) room in the centre. Unlike a lot of houses, ours had running water. Unlike a few houses, ours did not have electricity. The whole place was minimalist to the extreme: most rooms were almost completely empty. Maybe a small wooden table or a handmade floormat or some bowls in a corner. The bedroom I shared with one of my sisters (Selma maybe, or Iyuna, or Hosfa) had the two beds and one small wooden table and that's all. And when I say bed, I really mean a frame made of tree limbs lashed together with crisscrossed ropes tied taught over the frame and covered with a floormat. Surprisingly, it was more comfortable than you'd think, and it was hot enough (eve at night) so that I didn't need more covering than one kanga as a sheet and another folded up as a pillow. My family did not provide bedding, so I was glad I'd brought the extra kanga.

I awoke in the morning at around 6 to the jarring sounds of pigeons courting in the rafters above my head, roosters doing the alarm clock thing outside the window, and Airplane Ears pitching in for good measure. Oh, the pigeons! The pigeons were invited into the peripheries of the house (there was an open-air gap between the straw roof and the house walls), and I definitely watched one of my brothers calling to the pigeons in the morning and tossing them food -- uncooked rice, I think -- and shooing away the chickens that came over to jack some pigeon food. I asked about the pigeons in Swahili, and I think the answer is that they eat pigeons. Kind of a weird thought, keeping pigeons for eating.

It was difficult to communicate, but not as bad as I'd expected because some of the older kids spoke rudimentary English. Still, I was definitely in the communication Stretch Zone. My brother Hyahye spoke English fluidly enough that he'd lull you into the false notion that he's proficient -- until you'd try to turn it into a conversation by asking questions, and then he'd respond totally nonsensically, which I'm sure I do in Swahili far worse. Like answering Yes to a non Yes/No question or just repeating the last part of the question in a decisive tone. He also kept asking me obscure things about Germany, such as the government system and how much a pair of trousers would cost in German money. I eventually worked out that he'd once met a couple of tourists from Germany who'd bequeathed their Zanzibar/Tanzania guidebook to him. Books being rare finds in Tumbe, it was a well-worn, banged up old thing, and even though he couldn't read it, he'd probably perused its pages hundreds of times. He didn't understand English as well as he spoke it, so what I found to work best was an ungainly mixture, wherein he used English and I used Swahili with a few odd English words I didn't know in Swahili. With the rest of the family, I relied heavily on pantomiming. Mama did the single best blender impression I have ever witnessed. She was trying to warn me that the pillau had chicken flavouring in it. I had managed to communicate that I didn't eat meat, and she was concerned about chicken powder.

My brother and a couple other teenage boys took me and their other wazungu charges round the island on the second day. It was mad chill. They took us down to the beach, quizzing us on Swahili words and then exchanging names for things unknown in both languages. Some of the village people were working out on the beach at what I'll tentatively call seaweed farms. Bundles of rubbery seaweed, which doesn't look like it would be appetising to any creature, although the boys claimed it was food for Chinese, were being collected and tied onto rows of strings staked into the sand. All the tying is done by hand, and Molly, Charles, and I got lessons in how to do it properly. It seems like such a pointless thing to do, like just something to do to have something to do. That's not actually such an outrageous concept. Tumbe is a more or less self-sustaining community, not a consumerist society, so there is much less to accomplish any given day than there is in a fast-paced society structured around the capitalistic need to produce surplus. Everything is pole pole to the extreme in Tumbe.

Tumbe is barely touched by Westernisation at all, but the ways it is are totally incongruous. In a village that doesn't bother with spoons or mattresses diapers or clocks, half the adults own a cell phone. Most of the houses use candlelight and kerosene lamps, but the few that do have electricity have a tv and dvd player. My first night, I visited a neighbour's house with one of my brother's friends. The kid stuck and Arnold Schwarzenegger DVD into the player and we watched a mute action flick with English subtitles while he taught me Swahili words and read to me from his Tanzania history textbook.

The boys leading us on a tour of the island were way into having us identify plants and eat anything potentially edible. Besides weird roots, tubers, and leaves, we got unripe mango and a whole coconut each. The guys talked a little kid (probably 7 or 8) into scaling a palm tree for us -- he tied his feet together with rope to serve as a stairstep grip -- and knock down a whole bunch of coconuts. It was awesome.

I definitely got the sense that my family was showing me off. Hyahye took me around to meet tons of people. We generally stuck around of an awkward half hour or so at whatever house -- just long enough for three quarters of the residents of all the nearby houses to show up and sit around staring at me -- then it would be time to go to the next house. I was introduced to about 50 "this is my grandmother"s -- some of them were even old men, but I forgive Hyahye his English mixups -- and all of them felt the need to test my knowledge of Swahili greetings. There are about 15 different ones, from the obligatory and respectful "Shikamoo" "Marahaba" to the informal "Mambo!" "Poa!"

Tumbe would be the absolute coolest place to be an old woman. Elders are given so much respect and care. All the grandmothers were just plain cool, too. It was amazing to see how much an important component of a society older people can be.

Back at home, I was assigned the task of sweeping and dishwashing. Okay, so doing the dishes was a little different from the Load, Unload of home, but a bar of soap, a few loops of abrasive twine as a scrub brush, and a couple pans of questionable water is still fairly effective at getting food slime off of bowls.

I got some genius henna done. It only cost the equivalent of about $3 USD and it's mad intricate all up and down both my arms. Every girl on our trip ended up getting henna in the two and a half days we were on Pemba. Mine is "pico" and henna, actually. Pico, which is black, was explained to me as "ink, like pen, you know pen?" but upon examining the packaging, we found out that it's really just hair dye. Japanese hair dye, judging by the ethnicity of all of the hair models in the pamphlet. I was informed after being hennaed that this design is special for weddings. I was already getting marriage propositions and questions, and the Wedding Special henna only intensified it. I'm at the marriageable age, so naturally everyone wanted to know if I'm married and how many kids I have, if Hyahye is my husband, or if I will marry them or one of their relations. The answer is No all around. Just to make that clear.

I got some steller photos of all the kids surrounding our bus on the last morning, and some of my family and other people's families too. I always feel like such a tool whipping out my camera, but my family had asked me within an hour of bringing me home if I'd brought a camera and would I please take pictures before leaving, so I figured it was legit.

The plane ride back to Zanzibar was almost as exciting as the initial boatride. We had to take three separate planes to get all 26 of us off the island, which should give you some idea of the size of the planes. One of them was a five-seater. In mine, Adams got shotgun. He sat in the copilot's seat next to the pilot. The "Welcome Aboard" announcement was delivered sans mic -- the pilot just looked over his shoulder at us, introduced himself, and reminded us about seatbelts and smoking. We hit a little turbulence and lights and alarms went off, but we didn't crash, so I guess it was okay. The whole flight was less than half an hour long.

We got our ballots yesterday, and voting is ensuing! I'm in charge of mailing off the DHL FedEx package tomorrow so that our ballots will get submitted in time. Exciting stuff!

Longest post probably of ever. Took three hours to write and an hour and a half to type!

knees spilling all over the place

There's something very admirable about a culture that dresses itself almost exclusively in simple rectangular sheets of fabric folded creatively. I'm getting better at properly putting on lesos (also called kangas -- I'm not sure the difference, if there is one) so that they don't fall off in the middle of the day, but I'm not yet confident enough in my skirt origami skills to go pantsless underneath. I've just about figured out how to assemble my hijab -- give it another couple of sessions and I'll be able to do it without a mirror even. The girls are supposed to wear hijab when we're out in public to be respectful of the Muslim culture that dominates the coast. There's some really fascinating theology behind the hijab tendency, and I'm actually really excited to be a Muslim poser for a spell. Tourists are glaringly obvious, with their frackin shoulders and knees spilling all over the place out of their tanktops and shorts. Even though it's a gazillion degrees outside (my finger nail polish actually melted off), men should be wearing man-dresses or man-skirts (called kikoi), and women should be wearing long skirts, tops, and a sheet of fabric encasing everything waist-up, exlcluding the face.

We are staying in a touristy part of Zanzibar called Stone Town. It is so different from everywhere else we've been, and so beautiful (despite the tourists). The streets and buildings look just like something that fell out of ancient Europe and into the tropics -- which, when you think about the history of Tanzania's colonisation and role as a trading port, isn't all that far from the truth.

We all went out for Italian food at one of the few open restaurants (it was Friday when we arrived, which is the Muslim equivalent of the Christian Sunday, but on steroids). Leanora and I split a pizza and seafood spaghetti and oh my god it was amazing. We've pretty much all been craving cheese-based foods because cheese is not big in Kikuyu diets, if it's there at all. Most kids got gelato for dessert, but fearing the repercussions of lactose intolerance, I opted for a nutella-filled croissant, which was equally amazing.

Although it's probably not advisable, I actually felt relatively safe wandering around by myself in Stone Town, even at night. It is rather labrynthine, though, so I do have to focus on where I'm going and where I've come from.

We'll be doing a three-day homestay on Pemba island this week. The fast boat (two hours) is no longer a transport option due to a worker's strike that just go started a few days ago. So we'll be taking the slooow boat, which will get us there in about eight hours and departs after sundown tonight. All-night boat right and 25 college students? Oh boy.

I'm actually a bit nervous about the Pemba homestay. We've been told our families won't speak any English, so I'm anticipating a lot of pantomime and attempts at fragmented Swahili. Pemba is a rural agricultural community (it's one of two places in the world that successfully grows cloves) that's 100% Muslim. It promises to be a very different experience from my Nairobi homestay. This is also the first time Lewis & Clark College has invade Pemba, so we're the guinea pigs and the first impression -- how well we handle it may well dictate if LC is ever invited back.

We're almost done with the academic portion of the trip -- we have one more essay to pump out and D Camp's history final to sit, then it's all snorkeling and tromping round the Serengeti. I'm nowhere near done with all Sperling's readings, but they seem to be more or less optional and to-be-completed-at-your-leisure, so who knows if I'll ever get to it all, though I'd certainly like to because they're so interesting. Maybe during the week of free travel. Yeah. Beach, pina coladas, and academic reaings on Muslim customs and the ancient Swahili people. Paradise.

on the fritz

I forgot the word for goat. And I completely missed an entire small essay. Other than that the Swahili exam went well, all two and a half hours of it. Also I feel a little bit better about missing the essay because a whole bunch of other students didn't see it either. My hope is that the Swahili teachers will take that into consideration and adjust accordingly. My vote goes for making that question into extra credit.

After the exam, Adam and I went to the national annual Agricultural Fair. It was pretty much your typical country fair -- prizes for the biggest pig and tents with information about how to grow tea and fight pests organically. The highlight of the Fair was mama signed me up to ride a camel. Camels are weird creatures. I mean really. That camel made sounds like it had swallowed a model T engine on the fritz and an unattended electric kettle too. It was pretty concerning. I sampled camel milk too, because when else am I going to get the opportunity?

Our Going Away luncheon as on Saturday. We all pitched in with the cooking. I cut up close to a zillion cucumber, zucchini, and eggplants for a massive pot of vegetable stew. During the luncheon, I got to carry around baby Kamau. He fell asleep on my shoulder. I am actually going to keep him.

Power outages ("blackouts" is the local term) are frequent in Kenya. Ten minutes after Las Dos Caras de Ana ended, the power blew. Africa isn't called the dark continent for nothing! For probably the only time in my life, we celebrated my birthday in the dark. Mama baked a cake uing half a box of old brownie mix and haphazardly estimated quantities of various other ingredients. The oven, it turns out, is broken, so the cake was baked dutch oven style -- hot coals piled on the lid of the pan set over more hot coals. It worked out and the cake was yummy. Mama even managed to round up twenty birthday candles, which eased the blackout for the three minutes they were lit. It was a lot of fun and super sweet of them.

It took me two hours to pack everything the next morning. I'm stil baffled at how I fit it all. We had birthday cake for breakfast. I walked all the way to a cyber before remembering the power was still out. I learned how to carry a baby on my back Kikuyu style with Grace and her mama while waiting for mama wangu to finish getting ready to go out to lunch. African baby-carrying is so much more awesome than newfangled Amerian backpacks and frontpacks. You can actually feel the kid and can tell what's up with her.

My family and Collin and Adam's family went out for lunch for the last time (riding in the back of a pickup truck -- it was raining again, of course), where we were serve approximately three quarters of a goat and several chickens. Mama Florence kept insisting the chicken was actually flamingo, but I was having none of her nonsense. Florence's granddaughter Flora, who is quite possibly the most obnoxious three-year-old on the planet (and this coming from someone who adores three-year-olds), entertained herself by beating on Collin and me. I practiced my Swahili with her since we're both at the beginning stages of language acquisition, and I'm all sorts of pleased to report that I'm improving.

We were dropped a Methodis Guest NHouse late in the afternoon. For the first time in literally a month I had a simultaneously hot and running shower. Ah, luxury. We went out for steller Ethiopian food for dinner and seemed to have been charged a wazungu tax, but whatever I was sooo good.

We took a bus to Mombasa that was so massive that it is probably soley responsible for the hole in the ozone layer. It was supposed to be about an 8 hour trip, but the bus broke down about two hours from Mombasa and sundown. We climbed up on top of the bus to avoid lions (don't worry, we weren't actually in lion territory) and watched the sunset. It was beautiful, if a bit inconvenient.

In true Maisha fashion, I got terribly sick on my birthday (well, the following morning). I got a bug from who know what, and wasn't keeping down even water for about 36 hours there. We were on and off buses all day, seeing Fort Jesus and buying kikoi in the marketplace at Mombasa, both of which woul have been enjoyable had I been feeling better. I actually fell asleep on the concrete at Fort Jesus because there was a sign on the grass that said Do Not Walk on the Grass. When it became apparent that over-the-counter meds were not fixing me, I was instructed to break out the cipro, which I obligingly took along with water and rehydration salts. I'm feeling much better now, but there were a couple of days there that were pretty unhappy. When I finally resurfaced and was able to appreciate where we were, I discovered we'd driven to paradise. You know those ads for exotic vacations that somehow have pristinely deserted tropical beaches? That was this place. Dunno what it's called, but we were at a resort about an hour north of Mombasa. It was stunningly beautiful. And best, there was no one around because it's not tourist season. I even woke up early on Thursday morning to watch the sunrise over the Indian Ocean -- which you can walk out into for about a mile before it gets deep, by the way, at the place we were staying. Zillions of shells all over the beach, too. Oh, and the beach was actually pretty much connected to our hotel. Incredible.

I seem to be uncharacteristically accident prone in East Africa. I managed to ram my left hand into a moving ceiling fan. Banged my fingers up a bit, but no permanent damage.

Before leaving for Zanzibar, our bus carried us to the Gede ruins outside of Mombasa. We got to walk all over this super neat old stone village. The Swahili people were clever several hundred years ago! They'd worked out how to rig a central cooling system and some rudimentary plumbing. There was a Tarzan-style treehouse way up in the top of a baobab tree there, so we could look out onto the entire wreckage of what was once Gede. We also got to sample baobab fruit, which is in the running for weirdest fruit in existence. It's super dry and crumbly on the inside -- you could never make baobab fruit juice. It's about the same texture as freeze-dried ice cream.

We're now in Zanzibar. We took a little puddle-jumper to get here. Tomorrow we'll start our three-day homestay on Pemba island, and after that it's back to Zanzibar for about a week. My internet access is drawing to a close -- probably only another few entries before we start safari.

smell like green

We rolled out of Satellite on our very own bus captained by our noble conductor Bonafice on Tuesday before 9am. Dave Sperling and D Camp caravaned in a sedan as a safety precaution (presumably to be used in case a hospital run became necessary). Bonafice rocked out to a hilarious mixtape of 80s and 90s classics -- badly recorded reggae style covers. My favourite was the reggae non-Cher cover of “Believe."

The drive was BEAUTIFUL IN ALL CAPITALS. We zipped through hours of banana plantations, rice paddies, and valleys so green I thought we might’ve been teleported to South America when I wasn’t looking. The highlands get a lot more rainfall than elsewhere and so look like Timon and Pumbaa’s slice of the Lion King. We shot along at about 80 miles an hour with the windows open wide. It was so nice to breathe fresh air again. Nairobi is choked with pollution, and everywhere in and around Satellite smells like a combination of chicken, goat, their poop, unclean dog, and burning wet garbage. The highlands, by contrast, smell like green.

We spent several sunburnt hours wandering around Embu in groups of two or three, attempting to tick items off our scavenger hunt list. Cara, Courtney, Adams, and I had lunch in a combination butcher shop/restaurant (I only wanted a soda) that had a fresh slab of disturbingly dead mammal suspended on a hook in the front window. I was revolted. This is my revolted face. I focused on my Stoney's ginger beer, which seems to only be available in Kenya and is basically ginger ale that kicks your butt with its ginger power skills. It's a Coca-Cola product that doesn't exist in the US.

Embu was fairly uneventful, except when Cara and I got tailed by a creepster hustler; when a van with 50 or 60 live chickens lashed to the roof by their feet drove by; and when I had to scare a glue kid off our bus. Oh, glue kids! Glue kids seem to exist in most medium-size cities. They're street kids who are so addicted to sniffing what mama wangu explained as shoe glue that their brains are pretty much soup. It's really sad. Some of these kids are primary-school age, and their futures are tattered jackets and plastic bottles filled with poison. We were under strict instructions from D Sperling not to make any sort of contact with these kids at all, but it's really hard to ignore four or five faces and several knocking fists separated from you by only half an inch of bus window plexiglass.

There was a bit of a mixup with our Embu hotel -- a large group was supposed to have checked out and hadn't, so there wasn't room to accommodate us. We ended up instead at a nearby hotel painted entirely in soft shades of pink and green. Baller. We were all in singles, too, except for maybe two doubles and the handful of boys who boarded across the street due to a slight lack of rooms. We had the run of the hotel, and we seized the opportunity to play cards (loudly and competitively) until late.

I'd gotten sunburned during the Embu Scavenger Hunt, and I stupidly left my aloe vera in my room at Satellite, just like every other student on the trip. Tosti (Sonia) lent me her tube of what she called "Skin Food," and I'm totally sold. I've no idea what's in it since the label is written entirely in German, but I burned every day of the trip (despite liberal applications of SPF 30) and every evening Tosti's magic goo returned me to Maisha-coloured. (The fresh aloe we found growing at the hotel and harvested may have helped too.)

On our way to Meru on Wednesday, we stopped at a pull-off for a photo opp, leg stretcher, and pee-in-the-bushes break. Our various necessities taken care of, we returned to the bus, and two or three students opted to ride in the Professor Car to free up some of the seats in our very crowded bus. What we didn't realise was that Kennedy (that's Kenneth, but we call him Kennedy because our Swahili teachers all seem to think that's his name) had not boarded either vehicle. Half an hour later, we pulled over to to discuss the route, and the bus kids realised Kennedy wasn't in the Professor Car as we'd thought, and vice versa. We had left Kennedy at the pullout! And of course his cell phone was packed in his backpack, safely stowed under a seat on the bus. D Sperling went back for him alone while the rest of us continued on. He found him napping under a tree, a pile of empty banana peels discarded nearby. Kennedy reports that he watched us pull away, figured we'd figure out he was missing eventually and come back for him, and so he took the opportunity to buy a bunch of Meru bananas and take a nap in the shade. He and D Sperling caught up with us at the school we were to visit outside of Meru.

We've all been obsessive about accounting for everyone since then. Really. Parents, you can relax.

The school we visited was an amazing experience. After we had tea and snack/lunch and took a tour, the secondary schoolers were led outside for Meet The Wazungu. It was SUPER awkward at first because we hadn't been briefed beyond "we're visiting a school." We had no idea what to do, what was expected of us, how long we'd be there -- anything. We tried to mingle and introduce ourselves and ask basic questions ("What sports do you play?" being the most popular) and we weren't getting much response. Eventually, some kids got frisbee and volleyball games started, and Anna and I taught tons of girls how to play "Down By The Banks." We wrote out the words (with Swahili vowels for the phonetic non-words parts) and taught both parts of the hand clapping. In return, a few of the girls tried to teach us one of their hand jives, which I had loads of trouble with because I'm such a slow kinesthetic learner.

When the primary school kids let out, they surrounded us. I had a fabulous time with this herd of children. I dispensed thousands of nipe tanos (that's "give me five"s) and handshakes. They were all fascinated by my hair, so several times I dipped down and allowed literally hundreds of small hands to maul my head from all directions. I retaliated by petting all their shaven heads (shaved is part of the dress code at this particular school at the primary level). At first they shrieked and backed away, but then they figured out what I was doing and started sticking their heads forward, Me First style. It was loads of fun.

Everyone else seemed exhausted, but I could've kept on for another few hours. When we finally boarded the bus and drove out, the children chased us down the road for so long we started making cracks about them training for the Kenya National Track Team. I got it on video on my digital camera.

I was assigned the Zebra Room at the hotel in Meru! No joke! The next morning we were headed for Nanyuki.

We stopped in Isiolo on our way to Nanyuki. Isiolo is mostly Muslim, and there was a beautiful mosque presiding over the city. A whole bunch of wanted to go investigate it. Mistake #1: Women are not allowed through the main entrance. We were already out of our shoes and had started removing our socks when the locals stopped us and pointed women to a side entrance. Mistake #2: Non-Muslims are not allowed inside. The girls were halfway up the side steps when Kowalski hailed us to inform us he'd just found out we were forbidden entrance. Oh well. Kowalski and I spent the rest of the hour questing for a functioning cyber (to no avail) and chasing off hawkers, glue kids, and creepsters.

In Nanyuki, I spent the evening and the preceding bus ride doing homework. We were assigned approximately four hours of reading, three essays, the usual journal entries, and we have our written Swahili final on Friday to study for. Every now and then, our professors like to remind us that this is an academic overseas programme. (I managed to finish everything before Monday morning, and I was even in bed before 1am, though I had to prod Liz into going to bed at midnight. She was determined to stay up till I'd finished, but she was asleep in front of the telly and I felt bad.)

Most of us woke up at 6am to climb to the roof and see the peak of Mt Kenya before the daily haze rolled in. We were high enough up in the mountains that the peak resembled a pointy hill more than a mountain, but it was still pretty.

On our way out we stopped at the Mt Kenya Safari Club. It's a super ritzy resort that you normally have to pay an entrance fee just to pass the gates and have a look around. We only got in for free because D Sperling convinced the owners that we were Serious Students interested in the on-site conservatory and possibly staying at the end of our trip. And we each had to buy a soda. Yeah RIGHT we'd stay there! It's 900 USD per night! You can order a several hundred dollar martini that comes with a complimentary hunk of tanzanite, one of the most expensive semi-precious stones in the world. A little bit out of our price range, not to mention our comfort range. The coolest thing about the Club was we all got to straddle the equator before we left. Shockingly, it's not as exciting as you'd imagine. My feet didn't feel like they were spinning in opposite directions or anything.

When we got back to Satellite, I found my first tailored leso shirt/dress/thing finished and folded on my bed! It's super awesome! And purple and yellow!

On Saturday, mama wangu took me and Adam to her shamba (farm). We met baba wangu there and Liz showed up just in time for lunch. They all wanted me to slaughter a chicken, but I was not having any of it, so I opted to watch while Adam did the deed. I helped pluck it, though. Liz declared me an accomplice to assassination -- this was, we agreed, a very important chicken, and so "murder" doesn't quite do it justice. I'll probably go hardcore vegetarian upon my return to the States, although I admit that there's something sadistically fun about yanking all the feathers off a chicken.

At the shamba, I also carried around a full-size turkey and watched baba force-feed turkey chicks (they're poor eaters on their own and he was giving them medicine mixed with ultra nutritional feed). Adam scaled a windmill for kicks.

It was peaceful at the shamba. I'm glad I got to visit, even if I chickened out when chicken kill time came. Yes, I did just make that pun. Feel free to send the Pun Police after me.

P.S. - A brief note on nicknames. We have three Adams and two Sonias (with different spellings). Since we don't discriminate, more people than just these five have garnered nicknames. Here's the key:

Adam Kowalski = Kowalski
Adam Lipus = Adams (that's what his host mama calls him, so it's stuck)
Adam Lane = Adam
Sonia Stolfo = Tosti or SS Pickle or Captain Pickle
Sonya with a Y = Shorty (she likes it, I checked)
Mika = Kuzubaa (the verb for to daydream)
Anja = Ann-jah, Onion (something to do with phonetics, I think)
Kenneth = Kennedy
Daniel = The Big One, Jesus Christ, or The Brother of Jesus Christ (all ways local Kenyans have repeatedly described him)
Dave Campion = D Camp or DC
Dave Sperling = D Sperling, D Sper, or The Dave

that's all that immediately come to mind.

the science of freckles

Liz goes to a performance arts festival thingy in Nairobi once a month. She was telling me about it on Saturday. It sounds wicked wild -- graffiti competition, live music, a freestyle rap-off, slam poetry -- the works. When I inquired (eagerly) which weekend it happens on so that we might go, she looked at the clock and said, "Ohhh... it's today, but now it's too late for us to go. We wouldn't arrive in time. Lamesauce. However, she's going to look up the dates and locations of the next ones for me, since several other major East African cities host the same event. Maybe I'll get to go to the one in Mombasa or something.

On Sunday, mama wangu and mama Florence (Collin and Adam's host mother) took me, Adam, and Daniel to Boma. The ride there was long and exciting: we almost got pickpocketed in the matatu (mama Flo scared the pickpocket off) and then the City Hoppa bus we'd switched to ran out of gas in the middle of the road. We had to disembark and flag another matatu. All in all, I think it took us about five "cars" (that seems to be colloquial for any public transport vehicles) to get to Boma.

At Boma, we climbed around in various traditional huts. Boma (which I think translates to something similar to village) is a cultural centre type thingy that Kenyan schoolchildren are taken to on field trips so many times that by the time they're Liz's age they have no desire to visit again. We marveled at some tribes' apparent dexterity with the kind of plastic some people line their gardens with. (In the huts, it was being used underneath the thatch roofs.)

We had lunch. There were monkeys in the trees. Monkeys! In the trees! Like squirrels or something! And I discovered drinking Sprite from a straw in a glass bottle, which is a weirder experience than you might think.

After lunch, we watched a variety of traditional dances and musical performances. I thought the drums would be my favourite, until the last group came out. Their performance was announced as "acrobatics," but it was way more than that. It was pretty much Cirque du Soleil without the strings, mixed with breakdancing, mixed with an all-male cheerleading squad, plus hardcore jumproping... in zebra suits. I especially liked when they broke out the limbo stick and then lit it on fire.

We'd seen camels on our way in to Boma, and mama wanted me to ride one, which I was game for. But when we came out from the dance performance, there was a distinct lack of camels. Oh well. Next time.

At one point this weekend mama asked me about those spots on my arms. She was very concerned and wanted to know what had caused them. So I explained the science of freckles and the difference between freckles and birthmarks.


I made friends with Bogwa. I gave him a sticker and helped him hold the kitty that'd been hanging around our front door all morning. Liz reports that after I left with mama for Boma, Bogwa was asking after me. In very fractured Swahili. (He's still learning how to speak.) Related: I got to play with two babies on Saturday. Kamau (again) and Muriuki, who is one month older.

Mama had to run some errands on Thursday and toted me along. At the tailor's, she tried on her orders-in-progress and I exclaimed over the awesomeness of having lesos (kangas -- traditional big sheets of fabric that are used for everything from a bikini wrap to strapping an infant to your back) made into custom outfits for around 400 shillings ($5 American). Mama's gonna take me to get measured this week so I can have one too -- her idea. I'm stoked! Tomorrow, my classmates and I are all leaving for a three-day excursion to Embu, though, so maybe mama and I will fit it in after school today.

I've made it my personal mission to dispense smiles to casual passersby. Often. Although I do favour kids and try to avoid all contact with sketchy drunk men. I report an average rate of 67% smileback.

cheese dependent

On Monday, Cara, Adams, Sonya and I played an improvised soca/monkey-in-the-middle game in Cara's compound. Her little sister Kikiri totally schooled us. Anjd she was in a long dress and socks on gravel. Oh, and she's nine. Rose, the House Help, played too, but she had a hard time of it because she was in flip-flops.

On Tuesday, mama wangu introduced me to another baby! Can you believe, there's a five-month-old living basically next door and I had no idea. Her mom told me I can come over anytime. I will. Usually baby Grace's big brother Bogwa is on babysitting duty, and I'm sure he wouldn't mind a break. He's about four and he just parks himself and the baby in front of the tv most of the time.

At Liz's suggestion, I let Bogwa and Tony (his older brother -- I'd hazard a guess at age 8) choose a fun-patterned pencil each from the giveaway collection I brought. They were delighted, and Bogwa was still carrying his around a few hours later.

Mama wangu taught me how to make chapati! I took notes as I helped, but mama doesn't believe in measuring, just in "using your brain," so my directions are fairly vague, like "mix flour and water until it's the consistency of bread dough." They don't even own measuring devices. I asked. It seems like all of my classmates plan on cooking or baking something for their host families (many of them already have), but I'm super intimidated by my lack of familiarity with how to use the things in mama's kitchen. We have a stove/oven, but as far as I can tell it's rarely used. Most meals are made over some kind of cook stove that involves gasoline and tall flames. Seriously, the house smells like a petrol station everyday when dinnertime rolls round. (Benzine!) I'm still not really used to it. Also, my family members are not fans of cheese, which reduces my repertoire of cookable options to about two things. I am cheese dependent. Would it make me a bad person if I never make dinner for my host family? What if I fed them pb&j sandwiches?

The Gate Man who lets us in and out of school (his name is Justus, but he's Gate Man in my head) has taken to telling me "I love you," every time I leave. This is probably my fault, as I made the mistake of engaging him in friendly conversation shortly after we began lessons instead of treating him like a rock. A rock that knows how to unbolt gates. And makes you ask to be let out in Swahili.

D. Camp (that's Professor Dave Campion for those who prefer using respectfully official titles with authority figures) has started our history lessons. Maybe it's just because I'm a bit of a history geek, but I'm actually enjoying the homework readings and in-class lectures. However, this might be tempered by the fact that D. Camp was wearing something akin to pyjamas during his first lecture. Hmm. Nope, it's gotta be the subject matter. British Industrial Revolution. Industrial Revolutions are my favourite.

I let Liz paint all my nails silver. She was thrilled to pieces. Now she's asking if any of my friends want their nails done.

And just so you know, I nearly had to type this whole thing twice, because just as I was getting ready to hit Publish Post the power went out in the entire cyber cafe. Fortunately, blogspot autosaved recently enough that I don't think anything was lost! (I'm at a different cyber cafe halfway down the block.)