Where tunakunywa bia

Habari za juoni? How are you tonight?
Nimechoka na rafiki tulikunywa bia. I’m tired and my friends drank beer. More explanation to follow in english.

Another full week of work behind us and a week of vacation ahead. Exciting times. We did a lot of briquetting this week and a lot of kiln burns. Old hat by now. We literally have hundreds of briquettes out drying in the EARD-CI yard right now. Or had as we just gave part of our stash away to two of the groups we’re working with, Vision 4 Youth and the Upendo group in Moivaro. Tucker and I brought the briquette batch to V4Y on Thursday for them to test themselves so they could begin thinking about pricing. But even more exciting, we also gave V4Y a grant to begin their briquetting business. We just funded a start-up. Yeah, we’re pretty legit. We even had a whole grant letter written out with an itemized list of what we wanted them to purchase with the funds. It went over really well until we realized that we had listed one of the parts with measurements in inches. That created a bit of confusion. Ah well, habits are hard to break.

Now, after a full working week, we are taking some time this week to relax and try the touristy side of Tanzania. Anna and Liliana came up from Dar for the weekend and James’ father and brother flew in from New York for the week. It’s quite a full house. Friday we went out to the Mango Tree bar where EMORG was hosting a fundraising trivia night. We defied all American stereotypes and won the trivia game. Sweet. Ok, so we Americans won the first two rounds by ourselves and then we were joined by our 8 European friends (our Dutch house mates plus some of their friends) for the last few rounds and they were quite helpful. And maybe we were 16 people on the team when the other teams only had 4 or 6 members. But hey, it was fun.

Another weekend highlight was a trip to the snake park. Thanks to Emily’s research we arrived on Sunday afternoon, perfectly in time for the weekly feeding. We watched, fascinated, as live chicks were tossed unceremoniously into the snake cages and the snakes sedately slithered their way over to the chirping birds, bit them, and, well, swallowed them. As I learned, eating is quite the process for snakes; some snakes took twenty minutes or more to consume a single chick. As long as I disconnected myself emotionally from the food, it was fine to watch. Emily took a lot of video and we actually found the video more disturbing to watch then the live performance which was interesting. But the main event was the python feeding. The python got a full, fat, live, rabbit to eat. We have plenty of pictures if anyone is really curious but I’d rather not post them here.

Now for the beer. There are four common beers in Tanzania: Serengeti, Kilimanjaro, Safari, and Tusker. We’ve had several discussion in our house about which is the best and if you can even taste the difference. So tonight we hosted a blind beer tasting. Emily, Gerrianne, and I were the pourers and the tally keepers. We decided to give the contestants a taste of all four beers first along with their names to start. Then we had 8 rounds of blind taste testing. After each round, all contestants had to write down their guess and then we’d bring out the next round.

What entertainment! After a few rounds of pouring, we pourers got a little bored. So to spice things up, so to speak, we added some Konyagi (a local alcohol, apparently very bitter/sour/blah) to one cup to see if the recipient would even notice. Nope, no response. Ok, so what will it take to get them to notice? We tried mixing two beers together. Nothing. Ah! Brilliant idea. Let’s add vinegar. We pour a bit of vinegar into each cup, add the beer on top, and swirl it around a bit to mix the contents. That ought to do it. We hand out the cups to our drinkers.

“This foam looks funny,” was the first comment. Damn, on to us already.

“Did you guys mix beers?” Well we’ll answer honestly, nope, no beers are mixed in your cups.

They shrug and sip the beers. No reaction. Some lip smacking, more sipping, but nobody pursues the questioning of the flavor. If we can mix vinegar into beer and have nobody comment on it, just saying, the standards of beer taste need to improve.

In the end, we had a tie for most correct answers: 4 out of 8. Now that’s a fail. As the Mythbusters would say, the myth of the distinctive flavors of Tanzanian beers is Busted. But still, fun to test. Even if the kitchen smelled a bit like a frat basement after the trials and after Emily’s failed attempt at balancing a try of full cups on her head.

On to the next great adventure: safari time!! We plan to head out bright and early tomorrow for our four day safari in Ngorogoro National park and Serengeti. Super exciting!! That’s all for now. Our internet is once again not fit for uploading pictures so I’ll try to upload after we return next weekend. Kwaheri!