More Highlights

Here’s a little bit more about what I’ve been up to in Tanzania. I have recently had two more free days. The second one of the semester I went to Karatu, which is only about a 20 minute drive from camp. For reference, Karatu is where the Ngorogoro Conservation Area starts. Many of us explored the market there. Karatu is very different from Mto wa Mbu in the sense that is far less touristy and has much more of a native feel. While walking around I bought two pieces of fabric that I recently brought to the tailor and made an order. I am having a dress, designed by myself, made with one of the fabrics. With the other I had a handbag made, headbands, and just ordered a pair of American-style shorts. I am so excited to pick these up and see how they came out and I will be sure to share! After shopping at the market for a while we walked to a local lodge for lunch called Kudu Lodge. It is this beautiful little oasis that is almost resort-like with a gorgeous pool/bar area. We also had the place mostly to ourselves. I was able to have my first American-style pizza there and I think it may have been the happiest 10 minutes of the trip so far in the time that it took to finish the entire thing. I also got to try savannah hard cider, which was delicious. The names all of the popular beers out here are Savannah, Safari, Serengeti, and Kilimanjaro, which I find kinda funny. This probably stems from the fact that people in Tanzania do not socially drink so these are named and geared towards tourists. For a small fee you can swim in the pool at the lodge, which many of us did. I opted out and just hung out in the sun near the pool for a while before heading back to camp.

In the week and a half following our day trip to Lake Manyara National Park, we had a relatively hefty scientific paper write up assigned to us on our baboon data. I ended up writing my paper on the activity budget of the baboons, by classifying all the behaviors I saw in the field and looking at how much time they spent feeding, moving around, socially interacting etc. relative to each other behavior. Baboons are surprisingly adaptable animals and the particular patterns of how they spend their day are dependent on which food sources are available, the amount of rainfall, troop size, and other factors. Based on a lot of this extensive background research, I compared the activity budget of the baboon in Manyara to typical patterns and trends demonstrated by other baboon populations. This assignment completely swallowed up all of my time. If we weren’t in class or in the field, I was doing this paper. I was convinced that I was going to go crazy from starting at a laptop screen for so many hours in a day. I was VERY happy to turn it in. However, as obnoxious as the paper felt I actually learned a lot about scientific writing and felt I actually completed a semi professional piece of work.

Once I had my life back I could embrace the pole-pole lifestyle of Tanzania for what felt like the first time since I got here. Pole-pole is the word used around Tanzania to describe the laid-back, in no rush, hakuna matata way of life that everybody around here embraces. I think for a person like me, a self-proclaimed stress ball, obsessive planner of a perfectionist, pole-pole is probably a good lifestyle adjustment to force upon me. I was able to start casually reading one of the books I brought with me called Love, Life and Elephants. I don’t remember the last time I had the time or energy in my life to read a book for fun, something that I used to love doing and been wishing to get back into. There really is nothing more relaxing than laying out in the sun or in a hammock with a book on camp. I have also been playing soccer a lot. Its been lots of fun trying to improve my skills, meanwhile there are some six year olds on the field who are basically just as good as me. Basically, the people in Rhotia are nasty at soccer and are no joke. Hopefully this means that I will come back a much better player, fingers crossed. I did score a goal the other day, which basically made me feel like a soccer god for about five minutes. When not playing soccer, a group of us on camp have taken up the insanity workout. Our student affairs manager has the whole program so she lets us borrow it. If you haven’t heard of the insanity workout, well…. it’s insane. It’s basically a 20-30 minute workout that is designed to try and kill you in as short of a time as possible. So far I really enjoy it because its one of the few ways we can workout while living here and I may actually leave camp in better shape than when I got here. Plus, I enjoy the personal challenge. I do worry about keeping my health in good shape, so I will definitely take care to not injure my back.

In general, I am starting to feel more settled into camp. It still doesn’t feel like home, and I do tend to get homesick sometimes. It’s been nice slowly getting to know the other students at camp. It is especially fun when every student of the day introduces a new game for us to all play after dinner. As of today, we have recently started up a game of assassin, where all of us have a secretly assigned person who we are supposed to “take out”. Basically as I write this post in the safety zone of my banda, people are running around screaming and running from their assassins or being ultra paranoid by anyone who approaches them. I think I’ll stick with my safe zone. Another fun thing we have had on camp are birthday celebrations. They are really something to look forward to here. Every time somebody has a birthday, the cook staff bakes a cake and they all come parading into the dining hall singing a traditional Iraqw tribe celebration song. They are clapping, dancing around, and soon the energy is infectious. We all clap and sing repeatedly “nyoa nyoo oodingo” while dancing around and following the staff in a big line around the dining hall. At the end of the song the staff picks up the birthday girl/guy and starts swinging them around. It is really so much fun and way better than the awkward happy birthday song that we do in America.

On Saturday we had our first community service day where we split up into groups and helped out in different areas of Rhotia. The community usually comes to SFS with projects that they would like help with and on our community service days, about once a month, we go out and do those projects. This time a few students went to the orphanage, some painted a gate at one of the primary schools, and some of us went to the tree nursery. SFS is currently building a library for the people of Rhotia and if we are lucky we will all get to help put the finishing touches on it before it opens at the end of the semester. I ended up helping out at the tree nursery, where some of the trees will be used to help reforest some of the surrounding area. They also had this incredibly cool plant called the “sensitive plant” where the leaves scrunch up once you touch it. It does this by rapid water release from specialized cells at the base of each leaf. It is thought to be an adaption to prevent herbivores from grazing on it. Overall, it felt good to take a break from class and give back to the community.

This past Sunday was another free day, where I spent the morning taking a Batik workshop. Batiking is actually originally an Indonesian style of art but the local artist, Samuel Kirita, has adopted it and made his living by travelling the world and giving workshops on this form of art, while also selling his own work. Kirita is actually considered the Batik expert in all of East Africa. So basically, I spent $10 to be given an art class by one of the most professional artists in all of East Africa. How awesome is that? Also, how lucky is it that he is living in this small community of Rhotia, where SFS also happens to be located? Anyways, this style of art is my favorite of what I have seen so far in any of the markets. The technique is done by painting wax onto a piece of fabric that has been pre-traced with the final design. The wax is painted on in places where the artist doesn’t want any of the dyes to soak into. You start by waxing out all of the spots you want to stay white, then going to add some dye, drying the fabric by a fire, and then starting a new layer with wax, repeating the process. For example, I picked a zebra design (he pre traced all the designs for us) and then I painted wax on all the white parts of the zebra. Then his assistants blended various colors to paint a vivid sunset color scheme. I dried the dye and then went back and added wax to my whole background, so that I could add the black color to my zebra without getting black in my sunset. Then once totally dry, you add wax over your entire fabric, let it cool, and then crinkle your art up so the wax breaks up. You add a color dye once again so it seeps through the cracks in the wax, giving it a crackled effect on your fabric. Then you scrap all of the wax off. Now that I am explaining it I realize that my design seemed like it should have been ridiculously simple, and I am wondering why I struggled so much to do it. I was pretty happy with how it was looking once I gave it to Kirita. They kept all of our fabric and did some process where they polish everything up before they give us the final product. Hopefully I am explaining this in a way that makes some sort of sense! Overall, I really enjoyed taking this class and I loved admiring all the beautiful work he was selling. I am hoping to bring back with me one of his pieces and I will be sure to post pictures of how mine came out once I get it back!

After the class, I went to Mto wa Mbu, basically for the sole mission of getting pizza at the pizza place they have, which is soooo good. If you couldn’t tell already there is a reoccurring theme of me missing pizza…a lot. I then tested out my bargaining skills at the Maasai Market and did some Christmas shopping, sorry family but you are having an African themed Christmas this year!

I am not sure if I will get to fit in one more post before I leave for expedition on Friday. We just had another awesome experience interviewing people living near the Ngorogoro Conservation Area about the human-wildlife conflicts that are dealing with. Stay tuned for some information on this experience. On Friday I will be leaving on camping expedition for five days to Tarangire National Park, so be prepared for A LOT of pictures once I get back. This time I should have some of the big cats!