quick mouse update

Turns out we didn't have mice afterall. We had a rat. A big rat. An ugly rat. Thankfully, we also apparently have an expert rat catcher and he happened to see our rat while cleaning the kitchen and was able to catch the rat and kill the rat in a rather unpleasant and violent way. I arrived home and was proudly shown our dead rat.

yuck.

Having problems uploading photos but I promise they will come as soon as possible.

Weekend on the Beach

I can't believe it but it's already been a month since I left Vancouver and two weeks since I arrived in Dar. Time is swishing by and I have yet to do anything productive.
I finally got out of the office long enough to enjoy the city a little. Saturday I got a tour of the neighborhood from a friend who lives/works where I live (there are a few flats that are rented out and then the main house where he lives with the owner). He took us through the smaller routes around the area and then to a nice quiet beach that's a little out of the way and so not so busy. Marika and I weren't expecting to be out so long and so didn't think of sunscreen. oops. But we weren't fully sunburnt... yet.
Sunday we went out to Bongoyo Island which has a really lovely beach and was not very busy. It was quite expensive to get out there and then we had to pay a park entry fee but it was a nice day at the end of which I must admit I have received my first ever sunburn. Just a little patch on one shoulder. I put on sunscreen and was in partial shade most of the time but the malaria meds make you sensitive to the sun so I guess it was enough. But it is nice to have a tan at last! I did take photos over the weekend and hopefully this evening I will get to the internet cafe to upload them.
I neglected to comment on food in my last post... Though the food is usually pretty good, there is very very little variety. A standard meal is rice or ugali with meat of some kind (always prepared the same way as far as I can tell). Often there is a little bit of veggies with it, sometimes some beans or cooked banana. Sometimes there is Pilau or Biryani which is basically the same thing but with flavored rice. The other option is chipsi and mishkaki (french fries and beef on a skewer)which can be excellent but sometimes the beef is very over-cooked from sitting on a grill until purchased. Fortunately, almost any type of food can be purchased so cooking at home adds a little variety to my meals. And there are lots of cheap, fresh fruits and veggies to buy so I'm trying to inject some health into my diet that way.

Thanks everyone who has made comments... it's nice to hear your thoughts (though maybe not the one about the mice... which, by the way, seem to be doing very well)

First Impressions

I get asked a lot by both locals and friends/family at home: "How do you find Tanzania?"

So, here's how I find Tanzania so far...

Dark. I'm finding it hard to get used to the daylight hours here. Because we are equatorial (only 6 degrees south) and have no daylight savings time, it is daylight here from approx. 6am to 6pm all year round (with maybe an extra half hour of dawn/dusk on either end). Seeing as there are no streetlights (not in the areas I've been to so far) and no city lights reflecting of cloud cover or any of that, it's really quite dark by 6:30. And for me that means my body starts to think it's late and by 10 it's hard to convince my body to stay awake. Also, with getting home from work around 5:30, this doesn't leave much daytime to wander around and I'm not yet so comfortable walking around alone after dark so for that I wait for my roommate.

Dusty. Though the main roads are paved here the shoulder of the road is dirt and there is also a lot of road construction (I'm assured that no progress has been made since my predecessor arrived a year ago) so there is a lot of dust being blown into the air by cars. It really hurts my eyes sometimes. And at night, when it's dark, the headlights stream through the dust and you can only see dust and silhouettes of people walking on the side of the road. It's really neat looking and I'm hoping to take a photo but obviously it's hard to get a good picture when it's dark and the light is moving.

Despite a few rainy days last week, the weather here has been good. The high has been just under 30 degrees but there is often a nice breeze and sometimes some clouds so it feels much cooler. So far it hasn't been too humid either. However, everyone keeps telling me that we are entering the rainy season so it is supposed to get hotter and more humid. Interestingly, the descriptions people give me of the expected weather over the next few months is quite different from the climate charts I've seen so I'll have to wait and see.

Other than that, I'm finding that, not surprisingly, a lot of people like to talk to Mzungu (means European but is used for all white people, possibly all foreigners) so you get a lot of people saying hi (mostly in Swahili) all the time. The children are cute because it seems to take them a while to get up the nerves to say hi so often I'll hear them yell "Hello!" several moments after I've walked by. The constant barrage of greetings is quite tiring as there are numerous greetings in Swahili and there is a correct response to each (you can't just say hi back) so it takes me a few moments before I can respond.

In other news, just when the battle against the household bugs seemed to be progressing (we've cleaned and sprayed and everything that needs to be sealed in a container is sealed reducing the bug population to a very acceptable level), it turns out we have a mouse. possibly mice. And our new housemate got into the cupboard last night and gnawed holes into various food packages. Thankfully the fruit and veggies are all kept in the fridge now and we were able to salvage the rice as it had only a very small hole in the bag.

Settling in

So I have had a few days to get settled in now and mostly things have been going very smoothly except for a few hiccups with my visa and my bank card. For some reason the Tanzania High Commission in Canada issued me a six month tourist visa (I did indicate I was on a volunteer internship) but here they won't accept that for some reason. So, they've allowed me into the country for two months by which time I need to apply for a resident permit. Which is all fine and good if it weren't for the ridiculous amount of money I paid for that damn visa. The High Commission will be receiving an email but I don't imagine it will accomplish much. The bank card situation is too frustrating to get into. Let's just leave it at the damn thing doesn't work.

Anyway, my home is quite comfortable and well located. I have a great (but slightly overpriced) grocery store, several atms, a movie theatre and excellent internet cafe within a five minute walk and it's only a 20 minute walk (or 5 minute bus) to work. There are currently two of us living in a four bedroom house with a lovely dining room, sitting room, kitchen and a private bathroom for every room. We have thoroughly cleaned the kitchen and have started to do some cooking there. Blackouts are quite frequent but we don't really need electricity so much anyway. I am working very hard on the swahili and have managed to learn basic greetings and numbers so far. Everyone seems very eager to teach me and I feel completely useless without it so I hope to become mildly conversant fairly quickly.

The first few days of work went by okay. My supervisor was invited at the last minute to a conference in Liberia so much of his time went to making arrangements and then he will be gone all of this week. It took me until now to adjust to the time difference too so I wasn't much use. I am focusing now and making arrangements for a big event to happen sometime in the next few weeks in which students and faculty at the university will be invited to a day with some speakers and entertainment and where HIV testing sites will be set up. I have serious questions about the possibility of success for this event but it's hard to know without knowing the community and what will motivate them to come out to a weekend event. Friday I was asked to sit down with a couple of members of the student government to figure out a budget for the event. Like I have any idea what tent rentals cost here!!!

Will take some photos today and post them next time I'm online... internet connection at the internet cafe is much better than at work so I'll have to do it here.

Arrival

I'm using my supervisor's computer at the moment as mine is "being fixed" so this will be a very brief post. Arrived safely in Dar yesterday morning having regained my sense of adventure after a brief lapse while trying to sleep in London between flights. So far, I have been well taken care of. Musiba, my supervisor, met me at the airport and got me all settled in at my house. I have a room in a house shared with three others. Things have been going very smoothly except for a few moments of panic when I woke up from my nap in the middle of a blackout (it was already dark outside and no one was home) and had to use the light from my wrist watch to find my cell phone and the light from my cell phone to find my still-packed flashlight. Fortunately the lights came on within about 30 minutes. So far I have come across various lizards, a frog, a spider, a goat, a chicken, monkeys (just hanging out on campus) and, most annoying so far, two loud and mean looking dogs and many very tiny ant like bugs found everywhere but also, particularly notable, in my bed. the loud dogs live very close to my window. the little bugs don't seem to bite and I've now set up my treated mosquito net (because I've seen some of those too) and that should help with these little bugs too hopefully. Will write more once I have some time to myself on a computer. The internet connection here is slow but not too terrible so updating shouldn't be an issue (photos my be another matter however).

This is the lovely room I enjoyed at Heathrow's Novotel between flights. It was very nice BUT they were doing some renovations in the hallway so it wasn't easy to get much sleep :(