Dragon, Dodo, and Safari

Sorry about the amount of time since the last post. So much has happened! Two weeks ago, we were on safari in northern Tanzania, and I think I can safely say that it was one of the best trips any of us has ever taken. We stopped briefly in Arusha, a northern city, and then went to Serengeti National Park, then to the Ngorongoro Crater, then to Lake Manyara, and then back to Arusha for a couple of days before returning home. It was wonderful enough that I don’t really know how to begin to tell you about it, so I’ve decided just to provide a list of highlights. In no particular order:

1. We saw a lot of animals, and some of them walked right by our safari vehicle. It must have been the season for baby animals, too, because we saw families of lions, elephants, zebras, cheetahs, warthogs, and wildebeests. I may be forgetting a few. The baby elephants in particular were very cute, since they were so (relatively) tiny, although there’s something to be said for baby warthogs, which look exactly like regular warthogs but are about half as big. And the baby zebras were adorable (see below).

2. Every time we saw a baby zebra, Eleuthera said, “Oh, they’re so cute!” Eleuthera also explained that she identified with the baby zebras, since they are brown and velvety when they are younger, and Eleuthera herself used to have light brown hair which is now much darker. Very zebra-like.

3. Bree, Eleuthera, and I all really liked the way zebras stand next to each other facing in different directions (presumably so that they can see predators coming). We practiced standing next to each other zebra-style.

4. In other zebra-related news, Tim wandered off one evening and Bree postulated that he had been eaten by zebras. Eleuthera sang “Got eaten by zebras” to the tune of “On top of spaghetti.”

5. We went camping! It was my first time camping, although everyone else had been before, and it was amazing. You should all try sleeping under the stars in the Serengeti. The sky was one of the clearest I have ever seen. We think we saw the Milky Way (not sure though) and the Southern Cross, and I saw a shooting star. We were actually in very warm tents, which was good because it was cold and damp at night, particularly in Ngorongoro.

6. We were accompanied on safari by a high school girl named Lillian, who got booked on the same tour with us, and by a guide and cook who we thought were named Dragon and Dodo. When they wrote their names down at the end of the trip, we discovered that Dragon’s name is actually Reagan or something similar, but Dodo’s name really is Dodo. They took terrific care of us and we would highly recommend them to anyone who is going on safari in Tanzania.

7. Dodo was a terrific cook. Our food on safari was actually better than our food here in Dar. It was also accompanied by his commentary. Dodo’s English was pretty good, and he would sometimes use unusual phrases that made us very happy. On our first night, he told us to wait because soon it would be time of soup. The soup turned out to be great (something involving leeks, I think), and we tried to get him to say “time of soup” whenever we could. He also once told us that before he cooked, he had to go wash his bod. Basically, he was a sweet guy and really good at his work, in which he took obvious pride. We were impressed by the range of food he made while we were on safari, and every night we got bread and soup as well as a main course. We think he should open a restaurant in the U.S., on the theory that people would come to hear him talk as well as to eat his food.

8. Dragon (sorry, I can’t call him anything else) was equally terrific. He had to have a variety of skills in order to do his job—he had to drive rough safari roads, speak English, and know enough about the animals to find them and tell us about them. He spoke Spanish as well as English, so Eleuthera and Tim wound up speaking Spanish with him. Just a very nice, mild-mannered guy. We miss him.

9. I should mention at this point that we were in a real safari vehicle with removable roof panels, so we spent a lot of time standing on the seats and standing halfway out of the truck, looking around us at the trees and animals. It was sort of like being in a convertible but much more so, and it made the experience that much more vivid. (Parents: Dragon was a very safe driver and we were totally okay.) 

10. We camped out on the lawn of a hotel one night, and we wound up talking to some of the salespeople who do business with tourists. They were interested in whether or not we knew American athletes and musicians. Tim told one guy that he knew Elton John and had rice and beans at his house. Another man asked me if I knew Snoopy.

11. Yet another man offered Tim money for his socks.

12. In general, the salespeople wanted to trade us for things from the U.S. We didn’t have much, since it was near the end of our trip and pretty much all we had were dirty clothes and bug spray—although one guy offered to trade for my bug spray.

I’m running out of time, so I think that’s all I can post for now. There will be more updates later, since more happened on safari and in the meantime we have started our jobs and been to Zanzibar.

Also, a very happy birthday and lots of love to my Aunt Connie.

~Caitlin

Dragon, Dodo, and Safari

Sorry about the amount of time since the last post. So much has happened! Two weeks ago, we were on safari in northern Tanzania, and I think I can safely say that it was one of the best trips any of us has ever taken. We stopped briefly in Arusha, a northern city, and then went to Serengeti National Park, then to the Ngorongoro Crater, then to Lake Manyara, and then back to Arusha for a couple of days before returning home. It was wonderful enough that I don’t really know how to begin to tell you about it, so I’ve decided just to provide a list of highlights. In no particular order:

1. We saw a lot of animals, and some of them walked right by our safari vehicle. It must have been the season for baby animals, too, because we saw families of lions, elephants, zebras, cheetahs, warthogs, and wildebeests. I may be forgetting a few. The baby elephants in particular were very cute, since they were so (relatively) tiny, although there’s something to be said for baby warthogs, which look exactly like regular warthogs but are about half as big. And the baby zebras were adorable (see below).

2. Every time we saw a baby zebra, Eleuthera said, “Oh, they’re so cute!” Eleuthera also explained that she identified with the baby zebras, since they are brown and velvety when they are younger, and Eleuthera herself used to have light brown hair which is now much darker. Very zebra-like.

3. Bree, Eleuthera, and I all really liked the way zebras stand next to each other facing in different directions (presumably so that they can see predators coming). We practiced standing next to each other zebra-style.

4. In other zebra-related news, Tim wandered off one evening and Bree postulated that he had been eaten by zebras. Eleuthera sang “Got eaten by zebras” to the tune of “On top of spaghetti.”

5. We went camping! It was my first time camping, although everyone else had been before, and it was amazing. You should all try sleeping under the stars in the Serengeti. The sky was one of the clearest I have ever seen. We think we saw the Milky Way (not sure though) and the Southern Cross, and I saw a shooting star. We were actually in very warm tents, which was good because it was cold and damp at night, particularly in Ngorongoro.

6. We were accompanied on safari by a high school girl named Lillian, who got booked on the same tour with us, and by a guide and cook who we thought were named Dragon and Dodo. When they wrote their names down at the end of the trip, we discovered that Dragon’s name is actually Reagan or something similar, but Dodo’s name really is Dodo. They took terrific care of us and we would highly recommend them to anyone who is going on safari in Tanzania.

7. Dodo was a terrific cook. Our food on safari was actually better than our food here in Dar. It was also accompanied by his commentary. Dodo’s English was pretty good, and he would sometimes use unusual phrases that made us very happy. On our first night, he told us to wait because soon it would be time of soup. The soup turned out to be great (something involving leeks, I think), and we tried to get him to say “time of soup” whenever we could. He also once told us that before he cooked, he had to go wash his bod. Basically, he was a sweet guy and really good at his work, in which he took obvious pride. We were impressed by the range of food he made while we were on safari, and every night we got bread and soup as well as a main course. We think he should open a restaurant in the U.S., on the theory that people would come to hear him talk as well as to eat his food.

8. Dragon (sorry, I can’t call him anything else) was equally terrific. He had to have a variety of skills in order to do his job—he had to drive rough safari roads, speak English, and know enough about the animals to find them and tell us about them. He spoke Spanish as well as English, so Eleuthera and Tim wound up speaking Spanish with him. Just a very nice, mild-mannered guy. We miss him.

9. I should mention at this point that we were in a real safari vehicle with removable roof panels, so we spent a lot of time standing on the seats and standing halfway out of the truck, looking around us at the trees and animals. It was sort of like being in a convertible but much more so, and it made the experience that much more vivid. (Parents: Dragon was a very safe driver and we were totally okay.) 

10. We camped out on the lawn of a hotel one night, and we wound up talking to some of the salespeople who do business with tourists. They were interested in whether or not we knew American athletes and musicians. Tim told one guy that he knew Elton John and had rice and beans at his house. Another man asked me if I knew Snoopy.

11. Yet another man offered Tim money for his socks.

12. In general, the salespeople wanted to trade us for things from the U.S. We didn’t have much, since it was near the end of our trip and pretty much all we had were dirty clothes and bug spray—although one guy offered to trade for my bug spray.

I’m running out of time, so I think that’s all I can post for now. There will be more updates later, since more happened on safari and in the meantime we have started our jobs and been to Zanzibar.

Also, a very happy birthday and lots of love to my Aunt Connie.

~Caitlin

Tumerudi

We’re back, everyone! Unfortunately, this is not the long post that we promised you: so much happened on safari that it’s going to take a little while longer to write that. But we thought we’d let you know that we’re home, we’re safe, and we had a wonderful time. We’ll post all about it later this week.

Go Portugal!

~Caitlin

Vyura vidogo

We've noticed that we're much closer to nature here in Tanzania than we were back home–there are animals everywhere. When we leave Dar es Salaam, we sometimes find the road blocked by goats, which come in all different colors and sizes here. The smallest ones, which must be babies, are two feet tall or shorter. Eleuthera and I are very fond of them. (I particularly like the way their ears flop when they move.) There's actually a goat living in Inno's yard as well, which we think belongs to the landlady. Sometimes we see it running around.

We also find tiny lizards living along the walls and Inno's balcony. I saw a relatively huge one the other day in the bathroom–it was about six inches long. It was a pleasant change from the roaches that I've already complained about (which are either all dead or scared to come out). Closest to home for me, though, are the two tiny frogs that took up residence in my room the other day. Neither was bigger than a cubic inch, and I only noticed them because when I got too close, they jumped about a foot off the ground and landed with a soft plop. At first, I tried to get them to leave, since I was worried that they wouldn't be able to get out and might get stepped on. Eventually I realized they weren't going to leave and they didn't seem to be in any danger of being squashed–they'd just jump out of the way. So I went to bed and listened to them jump around. I haven't seen them since then. It's possible that they're gone, but they also blend in, so it's hard to tell. I think one was under my bed for a while.

And to add to our adventures in malapropism: I wasn't feeling well the other day, and normally I would have just mimed having a sore throat, but my phrasebook specified how to say "I have a sore throat": "Ninauma roho." As a lifelong Monty Python fan, I should have known better than to trust a phrasebook, but I memorized the phrase and said it to a few people throughout the day. They looked confused, and one woman put her hand over my heart and said something serious-sounding (I told her I didn't understand), but I figured my pronunciation was just a little off. When I went to school yesterday morning, I said the same thing to Richard, our teacher, who laughed at me. He told me I should be saying, "Ninaumwa koo."

Okay, I said. "So what does 'roho' mean?"

He hesitated. "It means 'spirit.'"

I had been telling everyone that I had a pain in my soul.

~Caitlin

Swahili is kind of difficult

Note: this was supposed to be posted several days ago, but our internet connection died, and I've edited it in spots since then, so in some places "yesterday" means yesterday and in some places it means last week. Sorry. 

Every weekday morning from 9 to 12, we have Swahili class with Richard, our teacher. We meet alongside a secondary school in a Catholic church in Posta, or central Dar es Salaam. The whole secondary school has about fifty kids and maybe half a dozen teachers, and everyone meets in one large room. Each class sits around a whiteboard, and the teachers rotate. We have a whiteboard too, although our teacher stays where he is. Sometimes we glance over at other groups to discover they are learning about algebra, hydrogen chemistry, or the symptoms and transmission of syphilis. (I think that was yesterday.) It's a very different environment than we're used to for school.

Our class is intense. It's just the four of us (Tim is here now), and I've never been in a language class that moved so quickly. I got here speaking almost no Swahili, and I can now put together sentences like, "Do you have the key to my room?" That doesn't mean I can always make myself understood–the words come slowly and my pronunciation is shaky–but I'm amazed at how rapidly we're all progressing. We're much, much better than we were a little while ago. And we've started to almost automatically refer to certain nouns, particularly food, by their Swahili names. So if you ask us what we had for dinner, we might say we had ndizi, nyama, and wali.

That said, we do still make some interesting mistakes. (See Bree's entry for today.) I think we sound pretty demented on a regular basis—I’m reminded of David Sedaris, who has described trying to buy calves’ brains in French and ending up saying, “Is thems the thoughts of cows?” It's easy to make mistakes in Swahili, actually, because of the way the language is structured. It's a regular language with few exceptions, so once you learn the rules, you're okay. However, there are a lot of rules to learn. There are about eight classes of nouns, like declensions in Latin, and while the nouns themselves don't change, everything else has to agree with them. And when I say everything, I mean the adjectives, the demonstrative pronouns, and even the verbs, which must agree with the class, person, and number of the subject as well as occasionally agreeing with the direct object. You wind up with a lot of alliteration. (“My books are bad” in Swahili is “Vitabu vyangu ni vibaya.”)

All the agreements mean that when you're starting to learn the language, as we are, you're likely to misuse words all the time. For example, one of the first words we learned was "nzuri," which means "good." If someone asks you how you're doing, you say "Nzuri." So for a while, we figured that we could say things like, "Chakula ni nzuri," when we meant, "The food is good." Unforunately, that's not how you say that. Chakula is in a different class than a person is, and so we should really have been saying "Chakula ni kizuri." It's not the biggest mistake in the world, but I'm pretty sure it made it even more difficult for people to understand us when we tried to talk. And of course, we make some simple vocabulary mistakes. The other day, I told the people who had us over for lunch that their books were delicious, and Bree, trying to say she was tired, accidentally told our teacher that she was hateful.

Swahili is also different from other languages I've learned in that everything goes on the front of the verb. If you wanted to say, "I taught myself," you would say "Nilijifundisha," in which "ni" indicates that the subject is "I," "li" shows that it's past tense, "ji" makes it reflexive, and "fundisha" is the stem of the verb meaning to teach. This isn't exactly hard, but it takes some getting used to. I think verbs are actually our strong suit–we can make positive and negative statements in four or so tenses, and we can also form imperatives and what I think are called hortatory forms (as in, "Let's go"). I'm very impressed by us. I won’t speak for the others, but for me, I don’t feel like I understand Swahili as a language yet. It’s more like a code that I can sometimes decipher. But it gets easier every day. 

On a more personal note: I moved out of Mikocheni B and into the homestay house a couple of nights ago. I think we're going to switch off staying there, although I'm not sure when. The water seems to work more regularly than at Inno's, where there have been some problems, and I have my own space in a sort of small guest house across the yard from the main house. It's not bad at all–the biggest drawback is that there were cockroaches in the bathroom. I sprayed them with Raid and I think they're all gone now. It's different in other ways. There's satellite TV, and I wound up watching part of The Italian Job with the host family. The family watches Nigerian movies, which deserve their own blog, and we also wound up watching Girls of the Playboy Mansion on E!. Monica and her family asked me if the show was supposed to be real. (For those not familiar with the show, it's a reality show about Hugh Hefner's girlfriends.) I also think that the cook is a bit more adventurous than Mary is, since she's cooking for real Tanzanians. I'm not sure exactly what was in the stew we had last night, but I think I saw intestines. (I ate around that part.) I like Monica and her family very much, and I'm having a nice time, although I miss everyone back at Inno's.

Bree seems to be updating everyone on her reading, so I'll do the same: I finished Beloved, which I thought was good but probably not the greatest book of the last 25 years, as well as both Rabbit Redux and Rabbit is Rich. I liked Rabbit is Rich best; actually, it’s my favorite of John Updike’s books that I’ve read so far. I think I need to read the fourth book in the series now.

Kwa herini and keep calling and e-mailing!

~Caitlin 

Wanafunzi

Before the beach, we had our first Swahili class Friday morning. We mostly reviewed things we had done back at Swarthmore. It seems like the class is going to move fairly quickly, which is exciting because we would like to know as much Swahili as possible. On Friday we did greetings, counting, days of the week, telling time, and introductions, so we are very good at saying things like,

Mambo! Jina langu ni Caitlin. Nina miaka ishirini. Sijaolewa.

Which means "Hey! My name is Caitlin. I am twenty. I am not married." Except that Bree accidentally said "Sijalewa," which means, "I'm not drunk yet." We make these kinds of mistakes sometimes.

We also learned that Swahili time is different from our time. (There was a minor struggle over the word "our" in the preceding setence; Caitlin points out that this is only true in East Africa, but Bree and Eleuthera maintain that other places may use different time as well. For instance, Canada is on a 20-hour clock.) The day starts at 7 AM, so that's 1. For any given hour on the clock, Swahili time is the number opposite that. So 9 is 3, 10 is 4, etc. Caitlin inadvertantly insulted the instructor by saying that the US has illogical measuring systems as well–like not using the metric system. People here seem to know both systems, since they are always able to tell us what time it is in a way that we understand.

Kwa herini! 

~B,C,&E 

Kipepeo Beach

We just got back from a lovely (albeit brief) weekend at the beach. It was incredibly gorgeous–we have photos but haven't yet figured out how to post them. Be patient as we learn. Right, but anyway, it was beautiful. It was the first place we (i.e., Bree) had ever seen where the place was as nice as the photos in the brochure. It was the first time in the Indian Ocean for all of us, and it was perfect weather, clear but with pleasantly chilly water. (Bree and Eleuthera point out that the water was actually warm and Caitlin is just used to exceptionally warm water.) There were also harmless, tiny clear (E. says "adorable") jellyfish that kept nudging up against us. We also saw creatures on the beach, including a camel, a horse, and a herd of small cattle. Seriously.

We slept in a banda, a small hut on the beach with three beds, mosquito netting, a fan that didn't plug in, and not much else. It was kind of perfect. (Parents: it also locked and we were totally safe.) The banda also cost $30 total for the three of us. We're going back. We swam, lay on the beach, and hung out at the bar eating chips and drinking (not much) Tusker, an award-winning East African beer with an elephant on the label. (Caitlin wonders why it was award-winning, Eleuthera likes the elephant, and Bree likes tasteless beer.) The whole experience was surprising, because we thought we were going to a public beach and camping out, without a lock on the door or anything. Instead, we wound up in this paradise, thanks to the planning of our hosts, Inno and Musa. We recommend Kipepeo for anyone who is thinking of honeymooning on the cheap, assuming you can get there.

Until we manage to post our own photos, check out the ones at http://www.kipepeovillage.com/gallery.htm. The pictures online are mostly of luxury suites, which were further from the beach than our banda was.

~B,C,&E 

Hamjambo!

Hey everyone! Welcome to our blog from Tanzania. Feel free to give yourself a username and post comments. We thought this would be an easy way to let you all know what's happening in Mikocheni B, Tanzania. If you're wondering about our blog name, "ndizi" means "banana," and it's our favorite word in Swahili. "Hamjambo" is essentially "How are you?" and is a common greeting around here.

There's not much of a post today because we are going to the beach this evening and probably spending the night there. We'll let you know later how it went. Wikendi njema! (We think that means, "Have a nice weekend.")

~Caitlin