I can count the number of days I have left in Tanzania on one hand. The past three and a half months have flown by, but at the same time I feel like I was figuring out what to pack for this crazy adventure forever ago. I am bracing myself for the adjustment I will have to make back into American life, as I am fully expecting there to be some things I will have to get used to again. People live so simply here, and I’ve come to realize Americans live the opposite of a simple life, even when trying to do so. Last month I was drinking tea in a mud hut, made with water fetched from a well a half mile away, served by a woman wearing sheets for clothes. This morning I boiled my own water and mixed it with a bucket of fetched well water to take a bath. It was a dramatic change coming into this experience, but I can’t help but predict that the change going back home will feel more drastic to me. You don’t realize how ridiculously unnecessary some of the things you do, have and worry about are until you go without them, and see how others live their lives perfectly fine without them. There are some things I also have learned to be incredibly grateful for, life western hospitals and healthcare, an infrastructure that supports paved roads, clean water and uncorrupt, responsive police, education, and much more. As much as I am grateful for the western luxuries I have back home, I am equally as grateful for the months I have spent exposed to simple ways of life that lead you to become aware of the things that are really important in life, like your family and friends and living a life of purpose, compassion and value. I have learned so much in these past few months, and I hope that being thrown back into American life will not take away the most important things I have learned.

I already know the initial conversations I’ll have with just about everyone when I get home. It’ll include “how was it?” and “tell me everything!”. I don’t even really know how to respond to those two things. I can’t summarize everything I learned, saw, did, felt, etc. in a few sentences. I would need a whole book to do that.

Overall this has been an incredibly rewarding learning experience. I am so glad that I decided to do a service-learning semester abroad, as opposed to a traditional study abroad experience in Europe. I think I have learned so much more about myself and the world we live in than I may have somewhere else.

This may or may not be my last blog post until I get home and have some time to reflect on this adventure. I look forward to seeing everyone and sharing stories when I get back.

Much love. 

It’s been an interesting final week in the village. It’s the rainiest part of rainy season right now, and it has completely affected our trainings this week. We are staying in a guest house in Longido town, and traveling about an hour and a half’s drive through the bush into the village every day. We got lost in Monday, considering there really isn’t a road to follow and if you stop and ask someone in a mud home for directions what are they going to say, “turn right after the flock of ostriches, left at the twentieth termite mound, and another left at the third hill”? So after taking three hours to reach the village, our trainees were over waiting for us and went home for the day. Tuesday we had our first HIV/AIDS trainings with forty participants, all community members, both men and women ages twenty five to sixty.  It was my first time teaching the subject to adults, and it was a much different experience. Surprisingly kids are more inclined to ask questions and don’t feel embarrassed doing so. The adults on the other hand were laughing and sheepishly grinning through most parts of the lesson, especially when a genital body part or sex was mentioned. Parts of our lessons include discussing the four infected bodily fluids that can pass HIV, and the five “open doors” that the fluids need to enter in order to pass the virus. One of these open doors is the anus, which lead them to asking how on earth one of these fluids would enter the anus in the first place, which lead to us having to inform them about anal sex. They were baffled by the entire topic, and we talked about it for a good half hour, all of us immaturely letting out a giggle every so often. Never would I have imagined I’d be leading a discussion on anal sex with forty Maasai people, god help me. But the good part is that they were disgusted by and I’m confident will not be passing HIV this way. 

It rained all Tuesday night and all morning Wednesday, making it impossible to get to the village without having to literally drive through two rivers and risk getting stuck in mud countless times. So we had rain day, similar to a snow day in New England, except instead of using our free time to go sledding, we went to Kenya! We are only about a twenty minutes drive on a paved road from the border, and the rain had stopped so we made a little day trip out of it. I thought I wouldn’t be able to actually cross the border because I don’t currently have a passport, but there was not an immigration officer around to stop me. We simply walked around the border town in the neighboring country for a little while, had a soda and took some touristy pictures under the “Welcome to Kenya “ sign, then made our way back to the guest house.

It rained even more Wednesday night into Thursday, but we we’re convinced to make it into the village to give at least one more lesson, since we planned on leaving Thursday night to go back to Arusha given that it is a holiday today. We all loaded in the truck and braced ourselves for what we knew would be a treacherous drive. We made it over the first river and about half way to the village, but then the mud got too deep. We finally got stuck and saw that the path ahead didn’t look any more promising, so we decided to throw in the towel. Turning around was the hardest part. Since we were stuck we all had to get out of the truck and wait far away from it while Musa our driver gunned it and slid in himself around a good one hundred feet until our truck was facing back towards Longido. I did literally absolutely nothing for the rest of the day. Musa went off to bring another group’s participants back to their village, so we had to wait for him to go back to Arusha. Eight pm rolled around and he still wasn’t back yet, so we decided to stay another night rather than going home. He made it back around nine, having gotten stuck multiple times.

It’s about seven am on Friday now, and we’re loading the truck to leave nice and early to ensure our day off. Training wise, it was an unsuccessful last week in the village, but all the free time gave us a good chance to spend time with our team for the last time. I’m going to miss this great group of people so much; they’ve become my family over the last nine weeks.

I don’t have very many plans for this weekend. I will go to church with my family on Sunday for Easter and participate in whatever celebrations they will hold after the service. It will be my first holiday in Tanzania and I’m interested to learn how different it will be from home.

I hope everyone back home has an excellent Easter Sunday! Sending love to you all. 

Life can throw you some pretty rough obstacles, sometimes quite a few in a row. Last week I was thrown my fair share; enough to make even the most optimistic person want to give up throw in the towel. Not to sound like a narcissist but I’m incredibly proud of my abilities to keep calm and carry on throughout what was most likely the unluckiest week of my life. Sure I may have shed a few tears after having a knife to my throat and having my passport stolen, but what twenty year old girl wouldn’t. It never came to a point where I needed to be given a paper bag to hyperventilate into. The thought of wanting to go home crossed my mind if only for a minute, but I would never actually consider giving up on this amazing experience and actually flying home early. Once I realized how well I’ve been doing considering my situations, I started questioning all the reasons why I might be so strong and able to continue on. I have a lot of reasons to credit for this, but the one that stuck out the most is how hypocritical and guilty it would make me feel to quit.

Here I am teaching hundreds of people to overcome their own obstacles and to recognize their own personal and environmental strengths to do so. I try and inspire people to believe they have the power and means to create a successful garden with poor soil and little water, to overcome stigma and gender inequality in protection against HIV, and tell people it’s okay to go against what they’ve always believed as right in terms of their diet and start eating things they would consider either not edible or gluttonous on a daily basis. If it takes audacity and strength for these people to make these changes in their lives, then I can have the strength to put my obstacles in the past and focus on the good things that will come in the future. Yes my passport was stolen, but most of the people I teach have barely left their village. Yes I was physically assaulted, but I am in perfect health today, which cannot be said for many of the people I have met throughout this experience. Yes all of my money was stolen and then an ATM ate the only card I have left, but at least I had money in the bank to begin with. Yes I had to endure a miserable fourteen hour bus ride in the scorching heat, but here I am in Tanzania participating in amazing projects and having experiences that most people could only dream about. My point is that I’m incredibly lucky to be here, and still feel so blessed despite a few unfortunate events. It’s not worth me brooding over such events as a misfortune, because that will only leave me with bitter and toxic thoughts that will deplete the sincere feelings of happiness I have experienced every single day in this country.

Peace and blessings to you all

It started out as a lazy Sunday. I had originally planned to relax at my house all day and catch up with homework and blog posts until my friends stopped by and insisted we go to the hospital for the nasty rash I had spreading all over my neck and arms. I insisted it was just heat rash, but in my head I knew that heat rash doesn’t last for 2 weeks and spread like a wildfire. So off we went to Arusha Treatment Center, where the doctor told me I had a rash, tried giving me a prescription for hydrocortisone  (thank you captain obvious)  and I probably got MRSA just from sitting in the waiting room. We left with my prescription and waited at the end of the street for our trusty taxi driver Chaz for about five minutes.

Then  the scariest moment of my life happened. I heard a man behind me and turned my head to see him standing with a knife next to my throat, insisting that I give him my bag. Shocked, I stood up and tried to run away, but he grabbed me and wouldn’t let me go. My friends had ran away when the saw the man had a knife, but turned around when they realized the knife was on my throat and I wasn’t running with them. I started kicking and screaming, all the while holding onto my bag for dear life because it had my passport, about $100 USD, phone, credit card and health insurance cards in it. I told him I wasn’t giving him the bag unless I could get my passport out. Not knowing if he understood me or not, he took the knife and sliced the strap to the shoulder bag in half (MY NEW LOUIS VUITTON BAG, THAT BASTARD!). This only merely let the strap fall off my shoulder, I was still gripping the actual bag across my chest. He then took both ends of the straps and tried ripping the bag out of my hands that way. This lead to him lifting me up off three feet off the ground and spinning me around in the air like a carousel horse. From this position I was able to land in a nice hard kick in the balls, then I looked down at my arm and saw the awful amounts of blood all over it. In a panic I let go of the bag and fell into the ditch next to us. Obviously, the man took off once I let go. It all happened so fast, but just as I released the bag about 20 people were running to us to try and help, but they weren’t quick enough. He ran across the street and hopped on the back of a motorcycle that was waiting for him, and was gone for good.

Once it was over, I climed out of the gutter and just looked at my friends and said “did that really just happen?” So we started making our way back to the hospital, to clean up my arm and asses for serious damage. I wasn’t in any pain and I was still just in so much shock that I didn’t really freak out. Not even a minute after it all happened, a truck full of police drove by and we yelled at them to stop. The saw me covered in blood and all the people standing around watching, and immediately all hopped out. Once we told them what happened they all pulled out their guns and were ready to take off on foot looking for  the guy, which I found kind of comical. We explained that he drove away on a motorcycle, then a nice witness agreed to drive us and a few officers to the police station, but not before we drove around for like a half hour looking for the guy. The driver of the vehicle ended up being a state attorney for immigration, and insisted that if I needed any help obtaining a new passport, that I call him. It wasn’t until I was in the car and actually gave it a minute to realize what happened that I started sobbing hysterically. After giving up looking for the man, we went to the police station and filed a report and got paperwork for a medical examination that would be free of charge. Everyone was extremely nice and sympathetic, so that made me feel better. Finally about an hour after the incident happened we went to the hospital and got my wound cleaned up. It’s not going to leave much of a battle scar, as he only scraped the top of my arm and didn’t really penetrate it. But the knife was rusty and I needed to get it cleaned out anyways. I also had the doctor write me a new prescription for whatever’s going on with my neck/arms, since that was in my bag.

I made it home safe and sound, and thank goodness my Mama had an extra key to my room, because guess where my original key was…

This morning I went back to the police station to file a claim for the items that were stolen and get copies of the reports for the Embassy and my travel insurance company. I was going to go to immigration and talk to them to see what they could do, but my program director told me they would only tell me I would need to go to the US Embassy in Dar, the capital, in order to report my passport stolen as well as apply for a new one.

So now I have an appointment at the Embassy on Thursday. My friend Vanessa and I get to take a lovely ten hour bus ride back to the big city. But I’m not going to lie; I’m not that mad I have to go back to the coast. I’ll think of it as a second Spring Break.

I also want to take the time to thank all of my friends and family that I scared the crap out of. All of your worried messages and posts have shown me what a good support system I have!

Last but not least I also want to say that this incident could have happened to anyone, anywhere in the world. It could have happened to me just as easily on the streets of Burlington or Providence. That one awful man is not at all a reflection of the Tanzanian people as a whole, and it upsets me when people make judgments or comments in regards to race and nationality. It is ignorant and toxic to say that he attacked me because he’s African or Black. White men and women commit crimes like this as well. I also want to say that this was the first time I have ever felt threatened in all my time spent in this beautiful country. Its people are more welcoming than any place back home, and they are extremely grateful and pleased to have me here.

Karma will get that man back one day, I’m sure of it. 

Before I head off to a new village for the week and am stricken of internet yet again, I wanted to share with you a little bit about the project I am super excited about and will be working on for the next few weeks.

As part of my final grade for the semester, myself and my two classmates have to do a final capstone project. Our original requirements were to design a curriculum based on entrepreneurial business skills as well as HIV/AIDS prevention with local street kids. The more we thought about this project, the less excited about it we were. The requirements were kind of scattered, broad, and had little to do with all that we have been experiencing throughout our past nine weeks spent here.

Instead of the project given to us, we have proposed a new idea for our final project, and if all goes well we will be creating a program much more sustainable and related to more of what we have been learning throughout our time here.

The ideas Clare, Vanessa and myself have come up with for the final capstone project are completely based upon what we have been learning and experiencing in our time spent facilitating sustainable agriculture as well as food drying and nutrition trainings. We have developed the idea of creating a community garden program for street youth, that enables them to work in exchange for produce that is cultivated. This program will empower the vulnerable youth to gain knowledge and experience with sustainable agriculture, entrepreneurship, food drying, nutrition, life skills and working as a team. The produce the youth earn by working in the gardens can be used in whatever manner they wish, whether it be sold to the public or local markets, restaurants and hotels that we plan on forming partnerships with, or for their own ingestion. 

Every week we have spent facilitating trainings in the villages have been expanding our sophistication in the topics being covered in GSC food security interventions. We feel that we know enough about sustainable agriculture, food drying and nutrition to come up with a program that will provide an environment where the youth can learn about these topics both through lectures and hands on experience.

We feel as though our idea is very sustainable for both the street youth, as well as the GSC stakeholders. This project is something we intend to be ongoing, as it will be GSC staff, volunteers and interns that will supervise and manage the garden and work being done to keep it up. If GSC intends to continue hosting Integrated service learning programs, this community garden projects is a perfect way for future participants to experience both BIA, food drying and nutrition, as well as working with the local Arusha community. The community garden project will prove to be different than experiences held in village trainings, as the trainers will have to oversee the actual production of a working garden, as well as interact with some of Arusha’s most vulnerable youth, which can be both challenging and extremely rewarding.

According to a 2010 census, there were approximately 261 youth living on the streets in Arusha. It is our intention to empower some of these youth to become less vulnerable to poverty, malnutrition, disease and stigma.

I will update you on the progressions of this project as it unfolds!

I cannot believe I’m down to my final five weeks in Tanzania. Time is passing by so quickly.
This past week was spent in Mfereji Village, which is located along the Great Rift Valley. It was the hottest and most remote village thus far, but it’s location provided me with the chance to see dozens of zebras, giraffes and gazelle all week. It’s pretty incredible looking up from whatever project your doing and seeing those sort of animals off in the distance. Mfereji is another Maasai village; working alongside these people will never get old. I am consistently amazed by how primitive they are, yet how innovate they can be when it comes to coming up with solutions for everyday life obstacles.

It was another chicken vaccination week. The first day of chicken vaccinations I was on a team with my friend Clare, our translator/intern, and a Maasai man. The families we had to vaccinate for lived up over the Rift Valley. Our Land Cruiser wouldn’t make it up the side of the mountain, so we had to hike our way to the chickens. It was an intense two hour journey up some steep paths, but  the view from the top was nothing short of gorgeous. The families lived so far apart that we only made it to two of them, and only ended up vaccinating 58 chickens, but every little bit helps. In traditional Maasai culture, one of the mamas offered us some goat after our work. Nothing like having to pretend you like foul tasting, over-cooked meat at 7:30 in the morning. She tried getting us to drink the oil it was cooked in, as is customary for them, but that was just beyond my comfort zone.

I taught sustainable agriculture again all week. I’m really getting into its concepts. I’ve been researching more and more about the Green Revolution, food sovereignty and the future of agriculture. I’m working on a blog post that details what all of these things actually are, and the reasons sustainable agriculture practices are so important to the future of our environment and food security.

After constructing a double-dug bed with my trainees, I realized why it is so hard or this village to cultivate any form of crops and why their diets are so poor. The climate, as well as their soil, is the driest I have seen thus far. The texture of their soil is so fine and sandy that it barely absorbs water. We shared with them that it may not be possible to improve the texture of their soil, but they can improve its structure by incorporating compost and double-digging (a method of creating a crop bed with deeply loosened soil). We also built six hafirs (rain water collection tanks) in the village, to be used for watering crops. I can only hope that they grasped the concepts we shared with them and will adapt their farming methods to reflect what we taught.

My biggest eye-opener this week was seeing the well where a majority of the village gets their water from. It’s a large, round cement tank with troughs along the circumference. Both people and animals take their water from the same trough. When I was there, a herd of cattle was just arriving for their afternoon drink. They completely surrounded the well, and as they were drinking continued to go to the bathroom. In order to get to the water you have to now walk through a sloppy wet mess of urine, feces and mud. This is not only unsanitary to walk in, but it’s also permeating the soil and eventually making its way into the water source. I watched the little boy herding the cattle walk right in-between two drinking cows, submerge his cup and drink the water right then and there, all while standing in the mess. The villagers do not make the connection between the dirty water they are drinking and diarrhea, dysentery and other diseases that it may cause. Part of our nutrition trainings deal with food hygiene, including boiling any water before you drink it, but only a fraction of the people actually make this change to their eating habits. What is a sustainable solution to a problem like this? If they’re not going to boil their water then just providing them with clean water would seem like the easiest solution. But as I have learned the easiest solution is not always the most sustainable, as this option would not teach them the harm in drinking from the current well in the first place.

I’m back in Arusha for the weekend and then heading to another village on Monday. This village isn’t as remote and rural, so we will be staying in a guest house the whole week. 

Happy St. Patricks Day! It will be my first time not celebrating the holiday like the true Irish girl that I am, but hakuna matata, there will be plenty more in the future! Someone will just have to make me some corned beef and cabbage when I get home. 

What an adventure the past few days has been. I keep stopping in my tracks to take a moment and realize how happy I am and how amazing this entire experience is.
After we left Karamba Resort in Kizimakazi, Zanzibar, we went to a small guest house in Stone Town, the heart of historical Zanzibar. We spent the afternoon wandering around the narrow streets crowded with old arab buildings and thousands of muslim people. As beautiful as it was, it was also a little intimidating to be surrounded by so many Muslim people. The women are dressed in a traditional manner so you can only see their faces or eyes. I felt exposed in a skirt that touched my feet  and a muscle shirt with a shawl covering my shoulders. As mentioned before, I’ll never really get used to being stared at by every person I pass in the streets.

We went to the Forhadani Gardens for appetizers, it’s a huge open market with tons of tables set up selling fresh grilled seafood. We bought a few skewers of fresh grilled lobster, fish and shrimp. We then went to an Indian restaurant and had the best Indian food I have ever tasted. After dinner we went to a local bar right on the water that trends to be popular with ex-pats and upscale Zanzibarians. We were joined at a table outside by the head coach of the Zanzibar soccer team and ambassador to Egypt. We had quite interesting conversations.

The next morning we were pretty ready to continue on to the next leg of our adventure. We took the ferry back to Dar and negotiated a taxi to take us to Bagamoyo for only 60,000 shillings (that’s like 45 dollars for a 2 hour ride). It was amazing driving into Bagamoyo and seeing all of the places I explored my first time in Tanzania. The first person I saw before I even got to my guesthouse was my best friend from 2010, Goddy. He was working at his newly opened shop in town and I made eye contact with him as we drove by. I yelled at the driver to stop the car, ran out, and had an emotional reunion with him. I was so incredibly happy to see him.

The next two days in Bagamoyo were filled with visiting my friends, showing my new friends around the town, going to the beach, dancing and drumming, and going to a few local reggae performances. My favorite moment of my time in Bagamoyo was my reunion with my favorite little girl in the whole world, Asha. Asha was 2 years old when I was her teacher at the African Modern Arts Park (AMAP)Nursery School in 2010. We were inseparable; she was either always on my hip or always holding my hand, even during lessons. She is the sweetest, happiest little girl I have ever met. I went back to AMAP Thursday evening and asked if Asha was still attending the nursery school, and to my luck she was. Friday morning I went to the school during their break time, and found my little friend. Right when I saw her I started crying and she ran up to me and gave me a big hug. I couldn’t believe that she remembered me, since she  could barely even talk when I last saw her. Our connection is indescribable, and if I could take her home to America with me I would in a heartbeat. It was by far the best reunion I’ve had with anybody in my entire life.

We thought that we would be able to get a bus back to Arusha straight from Dar, but that’s not the case. Our other issue was that the busses leave for Arusha from Dar at 6 am. There was no chance we were going to make it to a bus Saturday morning in Dar, when Bagamoyo is two hours away. So we took a taxi back to Dar and got a room at this extravagant hotel for the night, and planned to get  the bus on Sunday morning instead. I wanted to stay at a cheap guest house, but the girls wanted to go all out for our last night of spring break. So we spent our last night in a ridiculous hotel on the Indian Ocean, eating amazing sushi from this oriental restaurant in another ridiculous high-end hotel, having drinks at the roof top bar of the same hotel, and going to a huge club with some Philippine people we met at the bar. It was a super fun night and perfect ending to the vacation of a lifetime. We didn’t get home until 2am, and our wake up call to catch the bus was at 4:30 am, so I made the decision to stay awake and wait until the 10 hour bus ride to sleep. The bus wasn’t as miserable this time, but still hot and uncomfortable. I was happy to get home and see my family, and they were so excited to have me back. Unfortunately I’ll be leaving them for yet another week, as I’m off to another village tomorrow. This week I’m teaching Sustainable Agriculture on my own to a group of Maasai adults. I will post a new blog when I return next weekend, have a great week! 

viewers take caution… this picture may make you incredibly jealous

Is it possible to be head over heels in love with a place? I am completely obsessed with the island of Zanzibar and the Karamba resort. I am so depressed to have to leave that place, but know whole-heartedly that I will be back there in the future. Yesterday we had to switch our room to a luxury suite because they overbooked…. The horror. Our new room was its own little villa, with an outdoor shower/bathtub and a porch that overlooked the infinity pool and Indian ocean. It was the kind of place you could see yourself spending the rest of your life in complete happiness. Whoever I marry needs to know in advanced that I refuse to honeymoon anywhere other than Zanzibar.

The Karamba resort is structured around ideas of holistic living. It offers a menu of fresh, healthy, organic and incredibly delicious food. I’ve never had fresh seafood that was more delicious and well prepared. The owner of the resort is a Spanish woman, and her husband is a Rastafarian yoga master from Uganda. The two have built an incredible space for a relaxing and exhilarating experience. I envy them completely; owning a resort in Zanzibar seems like the perfect life career.

We went swimming with dolphins off the coast of our resort yesterday. It was quite the hilarious experience. You get in a locally built boat, track down the dolphins and drive the boat up to them quickly, then literally just jump off the boat and swim after them. Clearly they were terrified of three girls ungracefully jumping into the water screeching and laughing and didn’t stick around long once we joined them in the water, but we still got to see them swimming below us and were within 20 feet of about a dozen dolphins total. After this we drove the boat to an area even closer to our resort and explored the coral there. We all just floated in the water and watched the incredible array of life below for about an hour and a half. It was incredibly relaxing.

For anyone planning on travelling abroad, make sure you know what type of payment the places you will be staying takes. This resort only took cash, and also charges American dollars for everything. So not only did we not have American money, we had to exchange the final bill to shillings. So multiply the $450 bill times 1.750, as per the current exchange rate, and you end up paying a whole lot more. I’m only half way through Spring Break and I’m already blowing through all my money, but luckily the next few places we are staying are local guest houses and will be much cheaper. No matter how much money I spend in the end and how much I end up owing my amazingly benevolent parents, it will all be worth it, as this is the experience of a lifetime.

I’m spending tonight in Stone Town, the city area of Zanzibar, going back to Dar tomorrow, and then going to Bagamoyo from there. I’m so excited to see all of my friends from my first trip to Tanzania when I get to Bagamoyo. When I left in 2010, I made a promise I would be back, and I am so happy I am keeping that promise.

Peace and Blessings

I don’t think there’s a happier girl in the world than me right now. I just showered off after a dip in a salt water pool on a cliff that overlooks the Indian Ocean under the moonlight. How many times will I get to say that in my life? I’m guessing not many.

As I was floating in the pool, watching lightning strike the water far off in the distance, I started to realize that there is nothing at all I could be mad or dissatisfied with in this moment of my life, and I have everything to be happy about. The sincere bliss that has contributed to shaping the past few days, as well as the past few weeks, is indescribably relaxing, exciting, exotic and adventurous. I apologize for not sharing an update with you all sooner, especially with my parents who are anticipant of phone calls every day.

My journey began on Saturday morning at 6am. Heather, Clare and myself boarded the bus and took our seats in the first and second rows, seats H2-H4. The first few hours was like any other bus ride I’ve taken from Burlington to Providence, save for a lack of wi-fi and a bathroom. We stopped after an hour and a half for the first bathroom break a little after Mr. Kilimanjaro. I bought some juice and mandazi (fried dough, most popular breakfast item) , went to the bathroom and got back on the bus. Once aboard I found my pillow on the floor in the aisle and two men sitting happily in my spot. I just knod of awkwardly grabbed my belongings, laughed out loud with my friends, and went some empty seats in the back,

We stopped for lunch around 11 at a truck stop in the middle of nowhere. It probably doesn’t even appear on a nap. We bought a close to 3 pound bag of sliced fruit for about 4 bucks, some potato crisps (chips) and water and got back on the bus. The seats we originally had were unoccupied again so we decided to steal them back, feeling entirely entitled since our tickets listed our seat number and we were there first. Once I put the belongings of whoever stole my original seat in the middle of the walkway, as were done to mine, I settled in and brought out my ticket in case of argument. The more I studied that ticket I realized my friend really couldn’t tell the difference between and H and the number four, and my ticket number was actually 43. I gathered my belongings once again and hurried back to my actual seat before the rightful owner of seat number 3 came back and I had to explain my stupidity. The rest of the bus ride, not to be bitter, was a miserable experience. There was no AC and a window Nazi was sitting behind heather and us; everytime we opened the window, he would reach forward 3 minutes later and close it. I was soaked with sweat and completely ready to get to Dar after an 8 hour trip.

We spent the rest of Saturday evening shopping at a mall. We looked like kids on Christmas morning walking around department stores that would be the equivalent of Wal-Mart in America. We then had dinner at Coco Beach, a spot mostly locals hang out at. Saturday night we stayed at a place called Rainbow hotel, across the street from the hotel we originally tried to stay at which wanted to charge us 120 for the room, and an additional 30 per person. Rainbow hotel was dramatically less at $90 for all three of us. We planned on hitting the town after dinner but one member of the team passed out early and I figured that would be a good idea for me to do too after my long day of travelling. Sunday we went to the biggest outdoor market I’ve ever seen. There were literally 10 blocks of merchants selling dresses, fabric, shoes and accessories. I picked up some more fabric, beaded flip flops, and a Louis Vuitton purse. We then bought our tickets for Zanzibar , went back to the hotel to gather our belongings, then found the ferry to Kigamboni.

We went to Sunrise Beach Resort on Kigamboni, the same place I camped on the beach when I was here in 2010. I never guessed that I would be back there again, but I was more than pleased to sitting on that magnificent white sand beach again. I got an hour and a half massage for about 30 bucks, and spent the rest of the time swimming, lounging and sharing bottles of wine with my friends. The ferry ride back to Dar es Salaam was hotter than the devil’s undercarriage and crowded beyond comfort. Trying to find your way onto the ferry with all your luggage was a scary experience, and I am not surprised by the fact that my cell phone was pick pocketed out of my backpack. That wasn’t the worst thing that could happen, as Clare got her wallet stolen. Luckily she only had about 50,000 shillings in it, a copy of her passport, and a few cards she can live without.

We took a taxi directly to the Zanzibar ferry and went into the passenger lounge to collect ourselves. It was one of those moments when you all look at each other, take a deep breath, start laughing and say “what the hell just happened?” We boarded the ferry and found a nice spot in the air conditioned cabin, sat back and relaxed and enjoyed the two hour ride. Once in Zanzibar we checked in with immigration, we only needed to show them our resident permits thank god, and found a taxi to take us to our hotel. The hotel we originally were going to stay at, Pongwe, upped their price and didn’t have a room big enough for us, so we found another. We are now at the Karamba resort, about an hour’s drive from Stone Town.

This is one of the most beautiful places I will ever  see in my life. It is only $100 per night for all three of us and includes breakfast. I feel as though this place is worth $2,000 per night. Its made of a little more than a dozen little white washed, thatched roof bungalows, that sit on cliffs overlooking the Indian ocean. Last night after an incredible dinner, we went night swimming in the pool I already described, and couldn’t help but mention how incredible awesome our lives are at least 30 times. We just ordered sushi for dinner, which you have to do twelve hours in advanced due to the fact that they make it fresh and go out and catch whatever it is that you order. Today we are going to go snorkeling and swim with the dolphins right in front of our resort.

Life really can’t get any better than this.  I’m going to wait until I get back and have some time to kill to upload pictures. I want to spend my time soaking up as much of this beauty as I can, and I won’t do that from a computer.