A Week in Review
As of Sunday, it has officially been one week since I have left the United States, and as of Tuesday officially my first week at camp. It still isn’t hitting me that I am here for the next three months. It still feels like I am on some sort of short-term school trip, but I am starting to feel even more settled in and adjusted to the drastically different lifestyle that we have here. However, as different as it is, I am really loving living in this beautiful country. Unfortunately, I was really sick on Saturday but I was able to start feeling better within a couple of day. My Swahili is still quite terrible and for sure an insult to the people of Tanzania but I am keeping my fingers crossed that it will get better with practice. We did spend one afternoon singing the “Swahili song” at camp with our professor to try and improve our skills. Also, I was very bummed to find out some of the truth behind the Lion King. For example, people don’t typically use hakuna matata as a common phrase as they will usually use it with tourists and sometimes with each other. Simba directly translates to lion, so the main character is a lion, named lion. Also, in the part of the movie where Rafiki sings “asante sana squash banana” he is literally singing “thank you very much squash banana”. Sounds better the first way, right?
I have had the chance to explore Rhotia a little more. We are spoiled with amazing views from our camp, which is about a mile high up in the hills. About a 15 minute walk from camp is this beautiful little coffee shop that grows all its own coffee beans with this back deck that overlooks the Ngorogoro conservation area. Another short hike away is the top of Moyo Hill with stunning views of Lake Manyara and the rest of Rhotia. I also found out that there are multiple tailors in Rhotia that will hand make clothes for us with the local fabrics we buy, most for less than $20. I am very excited to try this out at some point this semester! I also signed up to participate in a teaching program where a group of us go to the town elementary school about once a week and help teach English to the kids. I am really excited about this opportunity and can’t wait to start.
Every Sunday is considered a free day where we have no classes (yes we have class on Saturdays) and we pick Rhotia, Karatu, or Mto wa Mbu to spend the day at. For our first day we went to Mto wa Mbu which translates to “mosquito river”. I took a knife painting class with a few other students, which may deceivingly make you think you are painting literal knives, which you are not. It is actually a very popular style of painting here in Tanzania and used similarly by artists around the world. The local artist, Suleman Matana, taught us his technique. You put your paint colors on a board and mix them each with grease. Then you take your painting knife (your tool) and rub your colors on your canvas using the bottom of the knife, blending them and being sure to not be too precise in your paint application to add texture. It was not as easy as he made it look as he did two pieces right in front of us as demonstration that I probably would have paid money to buy. You can see in my pictures below my elephant painting!
In the afternoon we went to the town market, which is about half for locals with local fruits and vegetables and half for tourists. In Tanzania, they use a bartering system so there is no set price for anything. It’s up to you to haggle down the price to something that you want (which is super intimidating at first). The store owners also made a bee line for us and would repeatedly ask us to come into their store or if we wanted to buy this or that. If they caught you looking at something, they jumped right on the opportunity to try and sell it to you. You often had to say no thank you “hapana asante” repeatedly and either tell them you had no money or you would come back another day to appease them. However, on the other hand the store-owners were really nice people and you could not help but like them. Many of them spoke broken English and were genuinely interested in having a conversation with you. Many of the fabrics and paintings in the market were very unique to anything I had ever seen before and very beautiful. I did buy one piece of fabric that I just couldn’t pass up, which is intricately patterned in all these different faces of wild cats. It ended up costing me about $9, but I think next time I can get it lower. I tried the whole walking away thing if they didn’t like your offer and it worked for me okay (I was honestly surprised I even made it that far in the process). Overall, it was a very cool experience!
Monday was our first traveling lecture, which means we leave camp and at different spots we stop and have various related lectures from our professors. Our first stop was about five minutes from camp on top of Kilima Tembo, which means elephant hill, and no there are no elephants on the hill or ones that you can see from the hill. It is named because the area used to be covered in elephants, but due to the land use change from forest to agricultural and land used for pastoralism (raising cattle, goats, etc.) elephants are now limited to the surrounding national park areas and the two corridors that connect them. This hill provided us with another stunning panoramic view of Lake Manyara, and all the land surrounding camp including Rhotia and the Ngorogoro conservation area. I learned that Lake Manyara is actually a really shallow lake, only about 4 meters at the deepest, as well as a saline lake. Climate change affects this lake more drastically each year, where frequent droughts can dry the lake out completely, which has happened 7 times in the last 30 years, leaving the major water source in the National Park gone. Also, flamingos that feed at the lake have been dying at alarmingly rates due to the cyanobacteria, their regular food source becoming fatally toxic due to climatic and land use changes in the area.
Due to deforestation and a drastic increase in human presence in the area, the forested land is highly fragmented, leaving the Tarangire-Manyara ecostystem and the Ngorogoro Conservation Area, connected to the Serengeti ecosystem attached by only two remaining corridors. This has led to increased focus on maintaining these corridors so species can move between the ecosystems, however, with more people and less available land for wildlife to move freely, there is an increase in human-wildlife conflict. For example, elephants come out of the forest and feed on the banana and pigeon pea crops, leaving local farmers very unhappy. Two of my professors at SFS have recently started a study building different fence types to effectively deter elephants from local farms. One fence type involves developing bee colonies along the fence, which also gives the farmer another source of income for selling honey. Elephants have surprisingly sensitive skin and are very much dislike bees, which is more than enough to keep them away. The second fence type is covered in oil and chili powder, which is a smell the elephants really can’t stand. They have had relatively good success with this project and we will most likely get to play some sort of role in it at some point!
The second part of the traveling lecture took us to a paddy field for growing rice and other cops. We had a local community member talk to us about how water usage is actually managed in the country. This lecture was a little confusing so there might be a few inaccuracies, but I think I got the gist of it. Tanzania’s water supply is broken up into about nine water basins, where each basin has a certain percentage of water usage that is left to the environment and the rest is usable by the people. Someone oversees the entire basin and what districts are allowed what percent of water usage. The smaller areas within the districts then form groups of representatives, usually composed of mostly farmers, who decide amongst themselves how they divide up the water availability they are given amongst themselves for their crops and for all the rest of the local people’s individual needs. This was another interesting lecture and I have really enjoyed the fact that we get to the leave the classroom and learn in the local communities.
Today I have just come back from Lake Manyara National Park where we spent the whole day! We spent the morning doing a baboon behavioral analysis activity and then the rest of the day driving around and observing wildlife. Stay tuned for a post in the next few days about my day here and hopefully lots of pictures!
