May 25th – Cairo!
May 26th – Johanna and I arrived at the airport at 3:30am, and were greeted by Carole, Yale’s in-country contact for Bulldogs in Uganda, and my new roommate, Titi, who had to wait for four hours since her flight got in around 11pm. We got to our apartments at around 4:30 and Titi and I didn’t feel ready to sleep, so we unpacked until 7am.
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| Titi TAPES up her mozzi net. |
We then slept until 12:30pm, when Carole took us to the nearby Oasis Mall, where we exchanged money, got phones/SIM cards (I brought my unlocked iPhone 3G… flashback to senior year of high school!), had lunch at Café Java’s, and got groceries at the Nakumatt supermarket. Titi napped while I read a little bit and stressed about how my flight change from Dar to Arusha wasn’t getting processed but I couldn’t get internet and had no cellphone airtime to call the airline. We all hung out in the evening and watched most of a movie called Total Recall until Jo and Macey wanted to go to bed. I worked on re-memorizing 1 Peter as I fell asleep — I set out to memorize it last summer but never made it past chapter 3 because school got busy in August.
May 27th – Titi got up around 3am and I joined her at 4am. I finished watching Total Recall, streaming it on our slow wi-fi after I successfully enabled Internet sharing from her computer since mine doesn’t have an Ethernet plug (and we only have one anyway). She went back to bed briefly before she had to go to work, and I slept from about 6:30-12:30, I think. I read a couple chapters of A.W. Tozer’s The Pursuit of God after I got up, boiled some water, struggled with the flight situation some more, and tried to decide what to do about the mini lizard I found in our apartment. It started to rain really hard, which I thought was beautiful until it started to flood our living room despite our windows being closed, so I cleaned that up (wringing the soaking bathmat out the window…), and finally went to the gym around four.
It was surprisingly full, I
guess because people were getting off work, and it smelled like body odor. All four treadmills were being used, so I did
some abs and then the Stairmaster for about five minutes as I waited for
someone to finish up on the treadmill.
There were two women wearing long skirts as they walked, one of whom was
barefoot. The other two men were also
walking, not jogging or running. It was
HOT, and the breeze outside afterward felt really nice. I also very smoothly (read: not so smoothly)
accidentally began filling my plastic water bottle with the hot water from the
filter, so the bottle started to melt. I
just sort of walked away feeling a bit embarrassed because I had only rushed to
pick that one since there were so many people around, all watching the white
girl who had just run on the treadmill in shorts. There were various ways in which I just
wasn’t fitting in… Johanna, Macey, Titi, and I hung out again at night, and I
made pasta and Bolognese as they watch TV and hung out. Good stuff.
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| view of the sunrise from our bedroom |
May 28th – I read and wrote in my
journal from about 4-6am, slept until 9:30, and went to work out. The only people there were the two men that
worked there, so it didn’t smell but was still fairly warm. I ran on the
treadmill for fifteen minutes, did some crunches, and then struggled to turn on
the Stairmaster (Each individual outlet has a switch on it.), so this guy came
over to help me. He proceeded to stand
there and tell me to go to a higher "effort level,” saying, “You only did
ten minutes on the treadmill and you only want to do five on stairs? Go
higher!” I said, “Oh, well actually I'm
going to get back on the treadmill afterward, but I just thought this would be
good since I'm going to climb a mountain next week…” “GO HIGHER!" he said, and then he kept
standing there the whole time as I’m wiped away my sweat and tried to explain
to him that I’m wasn’t used to the temperature yet. He told me I should come running outside with
him and the guys next week (ummm… maybe with Connor there? I’m definitely not going by myself!).
I finished up at the gym, showered, heated up
some of the pasta and Bolognese for lunch while I read a few psalms, and then
headed to the grocery store. I wasn’t
sure of the shortcut we’d taken, so I walked just under half an hour to get
there. Nobody really smiled at me or one
another on the street, which felt weirdly and unexpectedly impersonal, and I
was the only muzungu I saw. My skirt,
which was just above my knees, was the shortest one I saw, too. I bought two oranges, a pineapple, an onion, a
disposable razor for Tanzania, and some cellphone airtime (thrilling, I
know). Where the interesting part comes
in is that I got rung up for buying 397 oranges and the guys didn’t know how to
ring up my razor, so I waited there for quite some time as the proper
procedures were discussed, multiple people recruited to help, etc. I wasn’t in a rush, though, so it was
primarily humorous despite the inconvenience.
Even though I’m pretty directionally challenged, I was able to find my
way home through the shortcut, and I’m not going to lie, I was pretty proud…
And Amara told me that she successfully got my flight to Arusha changed, so
that was a huge help and relief. Titi
and I had more pasta for dinner, while Jo had some Ramen and Macey had a
microwaved egg and sausage. She says she
doesn’t really care much about how her food tastes as long as it’s food. Silly as it may seem, it was nice to
reconnect with a few friends back home by using Snapchat in the evening. I read more of my book before heading to
bed. I took some Benadryl and was able
to sleep a little bit better.
May 29th – I can’t really remember what I did. I think I went to the gym, did some email, read my Bible, took a nap, boiled some water, and rearranged the kitchen. Hanging out with Macey and Jo in the evening was fun, and Titi and I struggled to make dinner for ourselves. The egg yolks here aren’t as yellow, so when you scramble them with their whites and a little bit of milk, it just doesn’t look very tasty. Titi made some bacon, and the oil went all over the stove and was fairly hot when it hit both of our skin, but it was worth it. We also put some sliced buns in the toaster; within a minute, the kitchen was smoky and it smelled like burnt toast. I salvaged them by scraping off the burnt parts, spreading a little butter on them, and putthing them in the microwave briefly. All in all, it was fun and a bit of an adventure to make the meal, and it tasted pretty good too! Titi and I both stayed up way too late. I think she was watching TV on her computer while I watched Dream Girls, and we each slept for a few hours before she got up for work and I headed to the airport to head to Tanzania.
May 30th – I got to the airport around
9am for my 10:45 flight, easily got through security, went to the bathroom, and
sat down at the airport restaurant for a minute before deciding around 9:30
that I might as well go through the second round of security to get to my
gate. A flight attendant greeted me, telling
me that I was the last one to board.
“Wow,” I thought, “So much for ‘Africa time.’” Since I knew I was last, I felt fine taking
an aisle seat in the front of the plane instead of my window seat in the
back. Looking at the calendar on my
phone, which said the flight was at 10:45, I asked the man in front of me what
time we were scheduled to leave. “In ten
minutes,” he said. Hmm, well that
explained why I was so late compared to everyone else. Honestly, it worked out perfectly for me,
though it would have been less than ideal for me to miss that flight. It was very pleasant flight – I just read
Luke and had some tasty orange-apple-pear juice. The flight attendant told me that my Bible
was beautiful, too. It actually is
pretty cool, with this shiny plastic-y cover that doesn’t get dirty or
destroyed when wet. Tanzania was beautiful even from the airstrip, but the picture doesn't do it justice... |
| Ugali is a typical East African food. |
Once Amara got there, we walked around for a couple hours and eventually decided to try to find one of the Indian restaurants that were in my Backpacker’s Guide to East and Southern Africa from 1995 (which has been highly recommended despite being nearly 20 years old). We took a cab to the general area and then walked for a while, asking several people along the way, but weren’t very successful. Eventually we found an “Indian” place that seemed to have more Indian-inspired food than Indian, but it was cheap and good, so we were happy. We walked around a bit after dinner (yes, it was dark, but no, we weren’t scared, and yes, parents, we were safe), which was really nice. We took a cab back to Juba and repacked for our morning departure to Arusha, struggled to get Amara’s mosquito net up, and read in bed for a little while before falling asleep.
May 31st – Neither of us slept
particularly well—I’d seen Amara’s headlamp on in the middle of the night and
was at least comforted that I wasn’t alone in my struggles—but we got up fairly
early, Amara finished packing the bag that she planned to leave at Juba for the
week, and we headed out to the airport.
Since we’d changed our flights, it took us a little longer to go in and
out of security, talk with the people at Precision Air’s ticketing window to
get our new ticket numbers, and eventually get checked in, but it all worked
out. I slept for most of the two-hour
flight, waking up only for my delicious orange-pear-apple juice and to get the
cashews they were handing out (SCORE). We asked the taxi driver who wanted to take us from the Arusha airport to our hostel if he knew where Ujamaa was, and his friend explained it to him, but we ended up driving around for a while, calling his friend, and eventually picking up some random guy from outside a car wash, who successfully led us there. Six Juilliard students who were teaching art classes around Arusha for four weeks welcomed us to Ujamaa, along with a South African Boy (we called him SAB) named Devon, who had been traveling and looking for work. Ujamaa means family in Swahili and was started by a woman who wanted to make volunteering in Arusha easier and more pleasant, as well as create more of a community feel in the hostel environment. It seems to be working fairly well. Three of the Juilliard kids and SAB were headed into town, so we figured we’d join them to check out the grocery options for our meals on the mountain. Once we got into town and people looked like they were about to head in their different directions, we started to ask them what their plans were and then they all instantly split like billiard balls being broken. Amara and I just laughed, making fun of ourselves for being so challenged in the friend department. Because of our subsequent struggles, “marafiki nyingi!” ([so] many friends!) became a running joke for us through the week.
We followed SAB to one of the banks, asked him what he was doing, and he told us he was looking for work, so we were like, “Umm, at the bank?” to which he replied that he was just getting money. Our communication struggles (masumbuko) continued for another minute before we gave up and went to find the other three to ask them. One of the girls pointed us to a minimart and a small grocery store, so we went in search of inspiration. We didn’t really find it, but we did decide on our Mt. Menu: rice, lentils, curry powder, and coconut milk for our two dinners, and PB&J or the protein bars we’d brought from home for breakfast and lunch. All the supplies cost about $20. We also got some pink dried fruit thinking it was raspberry, and we were really excited about it, but then it was this really gross and kind of spicy thing with a pit and we were pretty disappointed. On the bright side, when we stopped to get an avocado on the side of the road, our use of Swahili and our zawadi (gift) of the dried fruit we didn’t like earned us a free gift of an orange (which was green, as the oranges in Tanzania all were…).
There was a really good dinner at the hostel, served family style, which necessarily included several awkward silences among the strangers staying there together, but I had my guidebook to distract me, and Amara and I went to our shared dorm room to pack. The other people at the hostel included a couple that was getting ready to trek Kilimanjaro (Sean was fairly nice, but his wife was pretty cold.), a few British medical students doing international rotations, a Dutch girl working with a recent graduate from Uni in Australia, and the early-forties Australian woman in charge of both of them. She was a nurse but also involved in developing a school in Arusha… We heard about lesson plans, teacher salaries, building a garden, and making a Twitter for the chickens in the coop. It was a little unclear what they were working on, but the chickens’ tweets that she came up with were pretty funny, and Ellen DeGeneres followed her handle within a matter of days. There was also a Canadian couple and they’re 12-year-old daughter who had taken the school year off (Mom is a teacher) to travel the world. The parents were a little hippie and the girl seemed like she was dying to see her friends. I feel like it’s a great experience for all of them but would have been richer for the daughter if she’d done it in high school, when she could appreciate it much more, not to mention connect better with the other people in the hostels, because there’s just nowhere a 12-year-old fits well with twenty-somethings. There was also sixty-something Len who sat out on the porch with a cigarette and a beer, talking to anyone who would listen about how well-traveled he was, but he was fairly negative about a number of experiences, so it was more sad than cool that he would be doing his African adventure alone. Most of the people stayed up to watch a movie, but after Amara and I successfully changed our flight out of Arusha to be later in the afternoon (because we were worried three days wouldn’t be enough time to trek Meru), we read and went to bed. Granted, we both slept terribly, but it was worth a shot. I didn’t sleep a wink until after 3:30am, which was mostly miserable because I knew we’d have a fairly long day starting at 6:45, but was also a really rich time of prayer, thoughtfulness, and recitation of the first two chapters of 1 Peter. I was grateful for the opportunity to have so many hours to pray for people, even if it was at the cost of sleep.
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| The beginning of the trail - Mt. Meru on the left and Little Meru on the right |
June 1st – We got up just before seven and commiserated about how terribly we’d slept. Apparently, Amara woke up around 3am and kept freaking out that we were going to freeze at the summit because we didn’t have enough clothes. I knew that I needed more clothing but I also wasn’t paranoid about it. After asking just about everyone at the hostel if they had anything we could borrow for three days (negative) and sitting on the floor trying to think for fifteen minutes, we decided we’d go into town right after breakfast and try to find somewhere to rent or buy a couple sweaters. Breakfast was toast, butter, peanut butter, mini bananas, and an amazing fruit salad, plus some awesome chai (Swahili for tea, not to be confused with what Americans think of as Chai tea). When we expressed a little doubt about knowing the right way into town, Sean (the thirty-something with the not-so-friendly wife) sort of nicely but sort of condescendingly was like, “I’ll just go with you.” We then talked about marriage for the fifteen minutes it took to walk to town. We were wandering around for all of two minutes when this Rastafari-looking guy started asking us questions and trying to guide us around or sell us a safari. I was hesitant, knowing that he would ask for a tip for his “helpfulness,” but Amara was going with it, so we let him take us to this sort of sketchy alley (at like 8:30 am) where they actually did have gear for us to rent! It was pretty much a glorified walk-in closet that was the rental shop, and the three-day rental of a puffy coat for Amara and fleece jacket for me only cost us ten bucks each. We then found ourselves surrounded by about six guys in the alleyway, two of whom we’d picked up as we were walking there—it seems like caravans just sort of construct themselves around white people. He led us up to Crown Eagle Adventures, a safari company that set up our ride to and from Arusha National Park. We had discussed the price a bit in the alleyway with one of the guys, who eventually offered us round-trip transportation for $160, so we thought that paying $80 now and $80 later made sense. We eventually got talked into paying $100 up front and $60 upon the return journey, as it was explained to us that we should think of the extra $20 as a deposit guaranteeing our ride and the availability of a car. After that, we loaded up the car and were off by 9am.
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| Our view from the taxi as we were driving into Arusha National Park |
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| Amara and me at Fig Tree Arch |
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