“Ninapenda kula mbwe”

“I like to eat [live] dog.” Possibly my favorite utterance by Ben yet. His frustrations at learning Swahili are highly amusing to everyone in the family, especially Thereza, who pretends to know much less than she does. This is her own unique sense of humor, and she enjoys torturing her mzungu friend. She’s a fun teacher despite not being the most trustworthy. We (Ben and I) are both coming along “pole pole- slowly”- although no one is learning as fast as Boon, who is the true Kiswahili master. This is good, because he seems to fall into all kinds of hapless trouble and is able to keep his head above water. There always seems to be one guy like that on every adventure.



{I know. You have no idea about who these people are. Too bad, it’s my blog, so I get to pretend like I have been regularly posting all along.}

Classes have been going well. Jason and I are the slowest to finish every lab, but I’m taking that as a good sign. It shows I have a thorough partner who wants to get the job done properly. When we finally do finish, it’s sometimes possible to meet up with Ben at his favorite place: the orphanage just down the road. Personally, I find the hundred or so kids with poopy diapers and runny noses a little overwhelming. But they are absurdly cute- the ones that speak English do so with flawless accents. This is both because the director is American and because of the number of foreign students studying at Danish that stop by on the way back from class. It’s hard to leave and Ben says the older kids (3-4) know that your leaving without them doesn’t bode well for them.



It was good to go into Arusha on Friday and get some “hands on” time at Mt Meru Hospital. We found a quiet corner with stacks of junk, some of which we were able to repair. This sphygmomanometer was the first thing we fixed- easy fix, there was a leak in the tubing. After that some folks moved onto an autoclave of an indeterminate era of origin, while others worked on repair of some old electric scooters.





Kristian’s makeshift work seat. We finally got it working…then rode it joyfully…then broke it again. We’ll have to come back to tackle it again. Jason, Lucas and I want to conquer this faulty power supply so that we can charge up the other scooter and maybe race them next week. The problem is somewhere around that blue thing on the left (we don’t know what it is).



The Usa River muezzin is calling, my Sunday is drawing to a close. When people ask where I am staying, I like to say that I come into school from the USA every day. It’s beautiful here (especially during those rare moments when the sun clears).



This is a picture of David and Maxima and their baby Brenda playing with Ben's iPod thingy during a power outage. I only post it because I think it's cool.

hujambo

Well, I had attempted to make a blog post last night, but unfortunately just as I hit "publish" the powered failed, the wireless went out, and the post was lost forever. How sad. It was great too, but you'll never know. I'm writing now after the first day of classes since we have some free time as it's our first day. Hopefully I'll be able to catch a dahla dahla into Arusha to buy a flashlight and watch which I think will be necessary pretty soon.

Just to update on the trip here and my first impressions:

I traveled for nearly three full days. The morning train from Pittsburgh to DC left at 5 am. I slept mostly, but my eyes opened occasionally to give me glimpses of the passing scenery. Everywhere were gorgeous gentle green valleys and I was a bit sad to leave as I passed through Panther Hollow and looked up at the house I called home for the last few months. DC was chaotic, the train arrived 2 hours late, the metro was backed up due the orange metro line (the one I had intended to take) jumping the tracks and backing everything up. So I had to surface at L'Enfant plaza and wait in the heat with my bags for the city bus to Dulles. All in all, no big deal, and I was amazed at the patience and friendliness of the people of DC through the whole ordeal. Ethiopian airlines was not the nicest, but I had two seats to myself to stretch out and sleep on. After stopping in Rome for refueling, and flying across North Africa we landed in Addis Ababa where I spent the night. The hotel was dubiously called the Hotel Semen on my transfer ticket, but it wasn't bad and I was only there for a few hours to sleep.

My impression of Addis is this: it's like someone got it in their head to make their own version of the typical Indian city, but somehow got everything just slightly wrong. The people have sharp features and light skin and look not quite like Indians, but certainly not like Africans. The Amharic script (called "moonscript" by Tyler Trawick) is devoid of any resemblance to Devanagari, like nothing I have seen before. At 8,000 ft. high the city is just a little too cold to be any major Indian city I have ever been to. The Coptic church looks a bit like Hinduism sometimes, but with crosses placed everywhere. The jetlag must have exacerbated the feeling that everything was just slightly out of place.

On the transfer I was able to meet a couple people and hear their views on Africa and Tanzania, and the problems and solutions they face: a woman from Kenya who works for a consortium of NGOs in East Africa and the US, a extraordinarily friendly businessman from Dar Es Salaam, and pilot, originally from Hershey who has been working plane for hire taking tourists into the Serengeti for the last two years. All very different, all very interesting.

The plane ride from Addis to Kilimanjaro airport via Nairobi was fun, I met Boon, a Malaysian student at Duke who is doing the Engineering World Health program as well. On our way in we had an incredible view of the summit of Kilimanjaro, which I won't forget soon. As soon as I can, I'll edit that picture into this post.

If I get time tomorrow, I'll post about classes and my host family, etc.

On a side note, there are monkeys everywhere and it is awesome. I love monkeys.

::edit:: finally, kilimanjaro