A Christian philosopher story

"I'm sorry, I can't get dinner with you tonight. I'm going to hear a Christian philosopher speak in Hong Kong central."

Not an excuse I thought I'd hear myself utter. Ever.

After class on Wednesday, one of my friends from class told me about this philosopher who was coming to speak in Hong Kong. My friend was helping to organize the event so he had some extra tickets to the talk. Would you like to come? he asked.

And that's how I found myself, on a Thursday night, on the subway heading to central Hong Kong and not totally sure what I was heading towards. I got off at the predetermined station, found the exit, and met up with my friend. "That's where we're headed," he said pointing. ICA, International Christian Assembly. Oh, it's a church.

Oh. It's a big church.

It was an auditorium style church with three large screens at the front displaying scenes from the stage they were hanging over. On the stage there was a band, complete with electric guitar and backup singers, playing songs that were a cross between Christian rock and hymns. I found a seat in the far back corner of the first floor and spent the following half an hour listening to songs and hearing a few prayers from various people.

When the the philosopher, Ravi, did get up to speak it was less of the lecture I had been expecting and more of a sermon. Makes sense considering the setting. I'm not totally sure where the philosophy came in, but the Christianity was certainly prevalent throughout the talk. He was a very engaging orator and shared many entertaining stories. Overall though, I had difficulty following his arguments. One in particular that stuck with me was evidence for a God. He cited that there was a 1 in 10 to the 40,000th chance that all of the enzymes necessary for life came together to form life by random chance. That's wicked small. So because that probability that life could arise by random chance is so small, QED, there must be a God. Honestly, I'm more fascinated by how one would calculate those odds.

I took the entire train ride home to internalize the experience. I'm still not sure what to call it besides an experience.

Besides that experience, we had our first typhoon warning! Mainly it entailed a bit of rain and wind and canceled morning classes; the actual typhoon missed us.

Excellent way to save energy.

Fresh, packaged corn anyone? It's even still slightly squishy!

Yesterday I took a hike up Victoria Peak in the evening and we were rewarded with this view from the top. One of my favorite buildings isn't pictured here. It's just to the left of this photo and it creates moving images up its sides with white lights. That sounds like I'm describing a television screen to somebody who's never seen a TV. But it isn't exactly a television. There's no screen, just the white lights and it's more subtle then a screen. Still, wicked cool and definitely worth the hike.

Hong Kong from the top of Victoria Peak. It's best at night.

Mid-Autumn Festival!

Happy Mid-Autumn festival! Last night Kat and I ventured out into the city to watch a fire dragon walk and see a lantern display. We spent some quality time milling in a crowd filled with the excited buzz that comes with holiday celebrations. We rubbed shoulders with couples taking selflies, walked by clumps of Europeans clutching beers, became jealous of the toddlers perched on their father's shoulders (who clearly had the best view in the crowd, but were too entertained by the glowsticks in their hands to pay any attention to the outside world), and generally craned our necks to see the Dragon.

Lanterns in Victoria's park which Kat and I visited after the dragon walk.

More lanterns and lights! There were lights strung up all over the park with lantern displays scattered around below. Quite romantic. We found several couples enjoying the ambiance.

Finally the Fire Dragon's walk began. We could tell because suddenly the air in front of us was filled with arms and smart phone screens. We had our pick of screens through which to watch the dragon. What a selection of choices! We had the classic iPhone, the samsung, even a few DSLR cameras. But the best part of the dragon that the smartphones couldn't capture was the smell of incense that filled the air. The dragon was stuck with hundreds of burning incense sticks that left a fiery trail of smoke and smell in their wake as the dragon raced by.

Happy to have seen the dragon, albeit only barely through the gaps in outstretched arms, Kat and I began to weave our way out through the crowd. Then began one of the oddest conglomerations of cultures I have ever witnessed.

"Are those bagpipes?"

Slowly rising over the noise of the crowd came the strains of scottish bagpipes. Kat and I gaped at each other. There, marching down the path that the fire dragon had just taken was a troupe of musicians playing the bagpipes. I even recognized the tune, Amazing Grace. How… interesting.

Kat and I taking a stellar selfie on the iPhone at the lantern display

Part of the skyline across the harbor.

Another highlight of this week was our school tour of Hong Kong. We spend Sunday wandering around bits of the city seeing the sights, taking pictures, and generally being tourists. Best part of the day for me: learning to count to ten in Cantonese. It took me the better part of the afternoon to get all the numbers straight in my head (ten whole numbers is a lot to keep track of) but once my friend taught me a little ditty to sing them to I was a pro. I spend the rest of the afternoon and evening contentedly singing the numbers to myself under my breath. I felt five again and it felt great.

A better view of the skyline from Victoria's peak. It was a super smoggy day but no complaints about the view.

Darren attempting to buy Asian pears in a market we found.
Asian pears are a cross between a crunchy pear and a large
apple. Super yummy!

Helana enjoying some shade. Sun umbrellas are quite popular around here and I'm beginning to understand why.
News alert: the sun is hot!

Hi from Hong Kong!

For anyone who knows the song, "It's five o'clock somewhere," I can verify, it is indeed always five o'clock somewhere. I flew with my classmate Kathryn from Chicago to Hong Kong and we had five o'clock lighting nearly the entire way. We also flew over the north pole (cloudy, unfortunately, so no santa sighting) so I'm not quite sure what the time was at that point. My guess is there's a hole in the fabric of space-time at the north pole because we spent 15 hours in the air, but landed 17 hours later according to time zones. This is the conclusion I reached in my sleep deprived and mentally addled state.

Flight path from Chicago to Hong Kong

We've now been in Hong Kong for a full week! I will be spending the term studying at the Chinese University of Hong Kong through the engineering exchange program at Dartmouth. Before anyone asks, no, I speak no Cantonese and yes, my classes are taught in English. The locals speak English to a varying degree and most signs have an English translation. I'm here with five other engineering students from Dartmouth and six hundred other international exchange students from all over the world. There's also about 20,000 local undergrads at the university who we are taking classes with (not all in one class, that would be absurd).

The view out of my dorm window. Those are university dorms in the foreground and the mountains we hiked in the background across the bay.

We spent orientation period generally being disoriented: getting lost on campus, wandering around in the city, trying street food: it's a great way to figure out a place!

I plan to use this blog to share anecdotes on day to day life in Hong Kong and any adventures I find along the way. Hopefully I'll share thoughts at least once a week but no promises during midterms.

Here we go! What better place to start than with a hiking story:

Trail sign!

Last Thursday, I set out on a hiking adventure with two other exchange students. For anyone who hears Hong Kong and thinks urban jungle, yes, there is a city (which I actually haven't visited yet) but Hong Kong is actually mostly forested jungle over mountains. Super awesome! My legs have mostly recovered from the Dartmouth 50 a month ago (hiking 50 miles in 27 hours. Good times) so we figured we'd do a short hike to ease into the hiking in Hong Kong. But the terrain isn't the problem. Unlike New England trails, (which don't believe in switch backs because why walk back and forth when you can climb straight up the mountain) trails here follow lovely meandering paths going back and forth up the steep sections. No, the problem was the fauna. An hour and a half into the hike and a quarter of a kilometer from the summit, we ran into a massive spider on a massive web.

I'm not afraid of spiders. I love spiders. They eat bugs. The look cool. So naturally I volunteered to pass by the web first. Come on guys, I told my hiking companions as they edged backwards down the path, it's a spider. It's more scared of you than you are of it.

Famous last words.

I crept up to within a foot of the spider. Right at mouth height. It raised its two front legs and snapped its finger-joint sized pincers at me. Once, twice. Yup, that's enough of that.

The picture doesn't do it justice. It was a big as my hand. My open hand.

Back down the path we sprinted, every step imagining the spider in hot pursuit. Shaking with adrenaline and dripping with sweat we paused for breath a suitable distance down the trail, no spider in sight. We never did see the view from the summit. Maybe another week. Or maybe a different peak. Just to be safe.

Lessons learned

What a whirlwind of a final week. We spent our last three days in Arusha saying a multitude of good-byes to all of our friends. We had one last session with Vision 4 Youth on Tuesday to unload their kiln that we had loaded a week ago and do some briquette pressing. It was nerve-wracking waiting to unpack their kiln. Did it work? Did it straight up fail with not even a little bit of charcoal to show proof of concept? Then what? When we took off the roof of the kiln, lo and behold, there was actual charcoal inside. Sure, not a perfect percentage yield but for a first run it was fantastic! Big sigh of relief. I think we’ve left Vision 4 Youth with a very solid foundation on which to build their briquetting business.

On Wednesday we said our good-byes to Sossy from Moivaro and spent the afternoon writing reports—three summer trip reports one of which goes to Green Mountain Coffee Roasters (our funders) and five guides for the DHE bioenergy group. Oh what joy. And the writing continued. Late into Wednesday night and more on Thursday morning. But come Thursday noon, done! Eight reports, 160 pages, wow. Glad that’s over with.

After a flight cancellation and a five hour wait in the airport (during which time Emily and I amused ourselves by thoroughly examining all of the trinket shops in the airport. I can now tell you with confidence that they all sell the exact same merchandise) we made it to Zanzibar. It has been strange spending these last three days in Zanzibar with absolutely no schedule. No meetings to attend, no dinner to cook, no dala-dala to catch, no surveys to translate. Strange but also rather nice. We spent Friday and Saturday on the beach, building a terrific sand castle-turned-city with a multitude of moats such that it resembled Amsterdam, being pushed over by a wicked strong rip tide, and getting quite sunburned. The Dhow ride was the highlight of the weekend. Dhows are the traditional, and still commonly used, sailboat of Zanzibar. They resemble a long, dug-out canoe with one sail and a wing sticking out on each side for stabilization (I’m completely blanking on the sailing terminology). In case anyone was curious, bailers are indeed the same around the world; I found an old gallon sized oil container with the top cut off in the bottom of the boat. Then we spent Sunday in Stonetown getting lost in the maze of alleyways  So many shops to peak into and paths to take. A very fun city to wander in.

Now we are reaching the end of the trip and the beginning of the adventure home to Boston. As it stands, from Zanzibar we plan to take five modes of transport to get home over the course of 31 hours and four countries. (Ferry, taxi, plane, train, bus, 5am Tanzania time to 5am EST, Tanzania, Kenya, Netherlands, the States. In case anyone’s counting.) This will be fun.

To finish this blog (though I’ll try to post a few more pictures later), I complied a list of what I’ve learned in Tanzania this summer. It isn’t exhaustive but it covers most of the basics I think. Thank you for coming with me as I navigated through life in Tanzania. Its been a great time. Gold star it you’ve read this far.

Karibuni Tanzania!; always carry your toilet paper into the stall, it does no good sitting outside in your backpack; pee in every flushing toilet you encounter, it’s a luxury not to be passed up; bikinis are a no-no; only practice balancing items on your head that won’t make huge, sticky messes when they inevitably tip; Tucker always has snickers; knives are sharp and should not be jabbed into hands; this is how you make chapati; this is how you make briquettes;  this is how you build a tanuru; this is how you cook 10 weeks worth of food using the same five ingredients; remember, karibuni; this is how you eat a perfect avocado; this is how you greet an elder; this is how you greet a friend and you damn well better reply with the correct response; this is how you pronounce Dutch g’s; this is how you cook Tanzanian rice; this is how you wear a proper konga; this is how you duck in and out of freezing water that passes for a shower; this is how you pee in a squatty without hitting your feet; this is how you fill a modem to catch internet; this is how you get good rafiki, evening, and volunteer price; this is how you write a survey in Swahili; this is how you order food in Swahili; this is how you sync sound on computers for a proper Hunger Games movie night; this is how you mix cassava porridge; this is how you don’t make briquettes; and also this; and this; this is how you cook Dutch food (add potatoes): this is how you make chocolate pancakes with brownie batter; this is how you bucket shower; this is how you bluff your way to winning The Resistance; google translate is your best friend; you’re a spy!; karibuni kiti; don’t itch bug bites, not even a little; oh that? That’s a thermocouple; kunya maji; there’s always room for one more on a dala-dala; big avocados are 500 and small avocados are 300; never accept the first marriage proposal, you never know when you’ll get a better offer; white ash is quite hot; don’t underestimate the power of the surface area to volume ratio; the iced fruit juice just isn’t worth it; it’s perfectly acceptable to push chicks up against a wall to suffocate them before gulping them down (snakes only); add chokaa to your mortar to avoid cracking; karibuni; cats don’t like being stepped on; remember, karibuni; pili pili makes everything better; no conversation can be finish without comparing the US to Europe at least once; movie nights are the best;  remember that bottles with tape are not for drinking unless you enjoy hanging out in a bathroom; briquettes will burn if they sit on a hot metal kiln; Jonas just wants the keys. Whatever else he says in swahili, just nod and smile; Ninaomba wail na maharage; Tunapenda Tanzania; For heaven’s sake cover your knees!; and never forget: We are tourists touring around Tanzania doing touristy things and traveling and wouldn’t dream of doing anything else as we’re just here to safari of course and travel. We’re tourists. Check our visas, they say the same. Why do you ask, immigration officer?

And so we go

Quick clarification: James did not get stabbed, he stabbed his own hand. Important difference, I think.

I was recently asked what my weirdest experience has been in Tanzania and my mind drew a complete blank. I suppose this means I’m used to the shouts of “Mzungu! Mzungu!” that follow me down every street, the sardine packed dala-dalas, the marriage proposals and confessions of love, the t-shirts from various US high schools (I’m still searching for an Andover or Dartmouth shirt), the cars driving on the wrong side of the road (both in the sense that by law the cars drive on the left hand side and in the sense that some drive on the right hand side just for kicks), the packs of guys who sit on motorcycles all day at the end of all the streets, and any of the myriad of other cultural nuances. In all likelihood I’ll return to the states and experience reverse culture shock. What, you can’t sit five people in that back of a taxi?

But last Sunday I had my weirdest experience in Tanzania: a squirrel stake out. Probably not what you were expecting but there you go. The four of us were on a walk with one of the guys who I met at the wood shop. The week before, we had held a session for him, and another guy, at our work site at EARD to teach them about briquetting from sawdust to finished pressed product. They were so into the charcoal production and the briquetting and both are now eager to try it themselves. That’s cool. Anyway, we’re on a walk around a nearby forest which includes a fair amount of pausing to contemplate streams, pausing to look at wild flowers, pausing to name trees, and pausing just to pause. There was a lot of pausing. We take another short pause to stare into a rustling and chirping bush. And then it becomes a longer pause. Finally I just have to ask, “What are we looking at?”

“There’s a squirrel in there,” says Emily. “Samuel says if we are very quiet and stay still, it will come closer so we can see it.”

Did you just say squirrel? Like the little grey ones that literally cover New England? The animals that you can’t walk 10 feet without seeing perched on a branch or on the sidewalk in front of you? I just wanted to clarify that that is the animal we are now waiting to see as we sit on a path in the middle of Tanzania, Africa with monkeys scampering in branches over our heads and a bull insemination farm ahead of us. It was a weird and ridiculous moment. I never did see the squirrel.

To finish the other moment that I wanted to elaborate on from the last post. The immigration officer. Tim had a nice conversation with her when she called him over to her car as we were walking to the dala-dala stand. I could only hear his side of the conversation, “Yes, we’re tourists…Traveling, we’ll be here for another two weeks….Staying in a house that we got through a contact here…Checking out the area, now we’re headed to the fair and we might see a film after…” and so on. We’re just tourists. Tourists. Now every time I walk down that road carrying a compound lever press which looks decidedly un-touristy I get a crick in my neck from turning to look for the officer’s pale pink car. At the sound of any approaching car, I’m ready to ditch the press in the bushes and hightail it home. A little nerve wracking to say the least.

Today (Monday) Emily and I returned to the group of VICOBA women we have been working with. (That reminds me. For anyone who didn’t know, I am also blogging for Scientific American Expeditions Blog which I think is kinda cool. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/expeditions/ The thought process that brought me to this is that I just send in a blog to Scientific American about this group of women. Check if out if you’d like some more background. It should be posted soon.) This is a group that DHE taught how to briquette last spring and summer. This summer we got to check in and see how things are going. The full story will be posted on Scientific American so I won’t rewrite it here. Today when we returned to Leganga, we brought with us two presses for the women so that they might expand their operation. The cheers and smiles that we received needed no translation. In that moment, with a group of 14 women smiling and thanking us and looking beyond happy, I felt completely at home. I felt that the entire summer had led up to that one moment and that everything had fallen into place. The hundreds of briquettes and piles of char that we had produced (and often rejected) actually had a purpose beyond rigorous data collection—we were actually using our knowledge to teaching others.

Apologies that that got a little sentimental. It was a good feeling.

This afternoon we did a deep clean of our yard space and decided what equipment would stay, what we’d pass on to the V4Y group tomorrow, and what was beyond salvaging. Surprisingly a summer’s worth of accumulated stuff didn’t take that long to pack up. Packing my trunk at the end of camp takes days longer.

And now we are into our final week in Tanzania. The last of our Dutch friends leave tomorrow and on Thursday we fly off to Zanzibar for a few days to try being real tourists. Then next Tuesday it’s back to New York. Woah. But between now and then lie 8 full reports to write (and I thought this was an off term), two more groups to wrap up and say good-bye to, and a house to clean and pack. Pole pole. Slow and steady.

The main, bustling street in Kigoma.

Tucker and James checking out our new metal kiln.

Just another work day. Lots of newspaper is shred to make binder for briquettes.

Pressing briquettes with the VICOBA group.

More briquette pressing.

Walking along an old aquaduct on our walk through the forest. Although you can't tell,
we're about 15 feet above the ground.

Women filling out a dudoso (survey) for us.

Explaining how to use the press to the VICOBA women.

More explaining.

A few of our briquettes nicely photo bombed by Emily.

Pole pole

If anyone needs a recommendation for a passable hospital in the Arusha region, we could point you in the right direction. After one stabbed hand and a weekend spent in and out of the hospital with one of our housemates, we’ve emerged with one stitched hand and one of our housemates on a plane home. (Business class I might add) At the moment, everyone is doing well though. Knock on wood.

Besides the time our household has spent in hospital runs (I myself haven’t had the chance to visit the hospital yet which I think I’m ok with) we have been go, go, going from meeting to meeting to briquette batch to kiln to meeting to airports. Wow. So a quick run down from where I last left off in order of occurrence:

Press briquettes, VICOBA meeting, open the kiln and briquette some more, discuss the destruction of the world by meteor, build a kiln with Vision 4 Youth, wander around the masaai craft market, press briquettes, find a trail of blood leading into the house at the end of which is James and his sliced hand, get questioned by an immigration officer while walking down the road (good times), check out the nane-nane festival in Arusha Town, ride on a dala-dala with 30 people on board (still haven’t broken the 30 people barrier), fly to Kigoma on a rather sketchy airline which felt a bit like a roller coaster ride toward the end (we landed in three bounces, Tucker swears we were on one wheel at one point), see Lake Tanganyika and realize just how much I’ve missed lakes, chill at JGI, set up a meeting with someone at JGI, fail to have that meeting at JGI (in his defense, the man was filming with National Geographic all day. In which case though wouldn’t you say that you’d be busy and that you couldn’t meet? Ah well. Karibuni Tanzania.), have that meeting on Sunday at JGI to discuss DHE’s future work with JGI (yay), the morning we return to Arusha Emily and I head to V4Y to pack and burn their kiln, met a wicked cool Aussie who has been couch surfing around Africa for two years and plans to head to Brazil via boat at some point, make briquettes, make charcoal, visit the women in Moivaro to hear their assessments of our briquettes, make briquettes, teach two guys who I met at the wood shop, but neither of whom actually work there, about the briquetting process, make more briquettes and briquetting molds, sleep.

Busy busy. As our Tanzanian friends would say, pole pole. Slow down! As of today, we only have one week left in the Arusha region to finish our work before we fly to Zanzibar for a few days and then head home. So we are packing up the days.

To elaborate on a few moments. Kigoma is spectacular, hot, and mosquito filled. I had just started getting over my bites from the beginning of the trip in Dar which I may have scratched a bit when, bam, hello Kigoma mosquitoes. Besides the pesky buzzing pests, Kigoma is wonderful. It is one of the biggest or the biggest city in Western Tanzania but that doesn’t tell you much because the city is quite small, one main street lined with one to two story store fronts surrounded by hills covered with sprawling suburbs. Everything is coated with a fine layer of red dust.

Ok power’s out and no battery. To be continued…

Safari!

Tulikwenda safari njema! We went on a great safari!

What really rounded out the experience were the nights we spent camping in the parks. On our first afternoon in Ngorongoro park, we trundled down yet another lumpy dirt path (the navigation skills of our driver where quite amazing. Basically zero signage anywhere in the park, crisscrossing and branching dirt tire tracks, and no geological markers with which to differentiate one path from another. Seriously impressive.) and into our campsite just as the sun was setting. A beautiful spot to camp. Stars shining brightly overhead and on all sides stretched the endless Serengeti (which means ‘endless plain’ in Swahili so that‘s rather redundant) with no wall, or any separation of any kind between us and the nocturnal animals of the park. Sleeping in the wild. Emily and I drifted to sleep listening to the crickets chirp around our tent.

About 3:15am I was jolted awake. For a few hazy, sleep disoriented seconds, I tried to gather my bearings. And then I heard the growling. A deep, guttural, predator sounding growling. Suddenly all my senses were on red alert, sleep forgotten, my eyes wide and staring into the darkness of the tent.

“Rachel. Rachel?” I hear a strained whisper from next to me. “Can I hold your hand?” I groped out into the dark, reaching for some comforting connection to a human. Clutching Emily’s hand, we lay there in the dark, listening to the growling. It seemed to be coming from not more than four meters away from our tent and, just saying, the animal gave me plenty of time and noise to use my echolocation skills. As the seconds crawled by, I tried to decide whether I’d rather hear the growling or hear nothing. On the one hand, I’d hear the deep threatening noise and know for certain the creature was still out there, bidding its time, but I’d also be assured of its location and that the distance between my head and the creature wasn’t decreasing. On the other hand, if the growling stopped, I could convince myself that the creature had wandered away. Or that it had stopped growling in order to start a sneak attack on our tent. Really, I’d just rather the sun came up. Then at least I could snap a picture like any good tourist.

For any of you who have read A Walk in the Woods, you might remember a scene where Bryson describes hearing a rustling outside his tent and getting up to investigate. He writes about the terror and subsequent adrenaline rush that he feels when confronted with the two reflective eyes he sees in the bushes. Bryson is an excellent writer and he describes the feeling of being alone in the wilderness with only a thin layer of canvas separating you from a mouth full of, most probably, very pointy teeth quite aptly. But until I lay in the dark, listening to the guttural growling of a very pissed-off sounding animal, I realized that mere words are completely insufficient to grok the feeling of lying on the ground in the blackness of night, completely vulnerable to the will of an angry creature. (Indecently, I am currently reading Stranger in a Strange Land so I’m also starting to grok, grok. A very useful word.) I will say that is an utterly blood chilling experience and I invite you to try it some time so that we might compare notes.

As I lay there, the growling stopping and starting intermittently, I mentally tried to decide what the animal could be. Nope, not a lion. I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure lions don’t growl like that. And anyway, I’d rather it wasn’t a lion so let’s not make it a lion. Ok could it be a fox? Yes, let’s go with that because I’d really rather not contemplate the rest of a long list of animals I don’t want to encounter in my tent in the dark. A fox I can deal with. A fox is small. A fox is—oh. A fox is small enough to hop right into our tent through the zippered door that I had thoughtfully left open along the bottom when I zipped it up last night. Well shit. Ok, ok, what’s the plan? What defenses do we have? Apparently not a sealed wall. A sharp implement of any sort? Besides nail clippers, nope. Light? My head lamp is around…somewhere. Right, if the fox sticks his head in through the open flap, I’ll grab my aluminum water bottle and whack it on the nose. Hopefully it goes for Emily first so I have more room to swing my bottle.

These are my frantic thoughts as the growling continues and my heart pounds on and on. Somewhere in the region of 3:45am I drift back to sleep. Next thing I hear is the trill of my alarm. I turn it off and listen intently. (Get it? In-TENT-ly?) Nothing besides the crickets. My chest unknots and relief floods my body. Against all odds, we survived!

Over a pre-dawn breakfast, we discuss the nighttime noise. Not surprisingly, we had all heard it. Molle, our guide, places the creature right away. Oh yes, he says, that growling last night was an Impala. One of those herbivore gazelles not even a meter tall. You’ve got to be kidding me. I’m still glad I had my water bottle ready. Just in case.

That was the most exciting moment of the safari. The rest is better summed up in pictures. We spent four days and three nights in the parks. First we drove in to Ngorongoro which isn’t actually a national park, only a conservation area. Basically the difference between Ngorongoro and Serengeti National Park is the Maasai are allowed to live and graze their cattle in Ngorongoro whereas they aren’t allowed to in Serengeti. As a consequence of this, the first day we saw mostly cows and goats and not many other animals. There were a lot of cows. Then we spent a day and a half in Serengeti followed by a day in Ngorongoro Crater. Stunning landscape and up close encounters with animal after animal. We even completed the big five! Several herds of elephants, a black rhino (there are less than 20 in the whole park!), herds of buffalo (their horns and their rather blank eyes reminded me of the vogons from A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for some reason) seven lions, and three leopards munching on a Thompson gazelle up in a tree. Wow. Long-necked giraffes were the most graceful animals and hyenas, looping around with eyes that stared pure death, were by far the least graceful. Wildebeests look ridiculous just as everyone says and hippos look way too adorable to be dangerous. Our personal Big Five, as in the five animals we saw the most often, would be cows, superb starlings (a twitchy blue and orange bird who like to hang around tourists waiting to be fed), Thompson’s gazelles, impala (which I’ve had quite enough of), and ostriches.

Highlight of the safari for Emily and I: watching animals poop. I spotted a pooping zebra and a pooping buffalo but missed the pooping lion until Tucker showed us a picture. (All completely as cool as a pooping cow, Liana.) We’re totally mature.

It was a wonderful safari and a good vacation. Still, nice to be back at our house with a chance to scrub out the layer of dust we accumulated. Now back to (a lot of) work. We have three, possibly four, sessions with groups scheduled for the next four days which we haven’t totally stated preparing for yet (yep, still functioning college students) and a trip out to Kigoma in western Tanzania scheduled for Thursday to Sunday to talk to the Jane Goodall Institute about working with them next winter and summer with briquetting. After returning from Kigoma, we’ll only have a week and a half to finish up our work in Arusha before heading out. Time is flying so way fast but I suppose that’s a good sign. Ninapenda Tanzania. I like Tanzania.

And now some pictures.

Dennis and Tucker, our two finalists for the beer tasting challenge.

Emily and I at a lookout over Ngorongoro crater. The far ridge is 10 km away.

Our wonderful truck at our first campsite in the dawn light. It only failed us
once when the brakes gave way. Luckily our diver was able to fix the brake
cable with some electrical tape. Not sketchy at all.

Emily and I at a lookout over the Serengeti.

And then we jump over the Serengeti!

Commence sequence of animals:

A black rhino. The truck next to it follows the rhino around all the time to protect it from poachers who want its horn.

A lioness with her cub not three meters outside our car. When she walked past us, I could have reached out and petted her.
But I didn't as I rather value my hand. She was beautiful and very regal. We spotted her just as the sun peaked out over the
Serengeti to begin another day.

An early morning yawn.

Another cub trotting down the road after his mother.

In total we saw 7 lions within ten minutes, all of the same pride. So close to us too!

A leopard, on of three, chilling in a trill with a snack dangling next to him.

Posing for the tourists.

Tembo! We were close enough to hear the crunch of the elephant's snack. The
sound of crunching branches sounded just like a human crunching granola. What
strong teeth elephants must have.

Twiga!

Tembo family!

A raft of hippos. What a nice way to spend the hot day.

The group and the Serengeti.

We were fans of jumping pictures.

The whole group.

Driving down a very steep road into Ngorongoro crater through a thick cloud.
This was after the brakes had broken and been fixed.

Wildebeest! 

Zebra butts!

Very itchy zebra.

Ah, and here we see the tourist in its natural habitat. We even got to watch them feeding.

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!

Trials of Communication

Communication through the language barrier is a tricky balance between talking down to people and expecting too much of an understanding of English. Heat measurement devices, for instance, are difficult to explain. We were preparing to light our kiln on Friday while a VICOBA meeting took place in the other corner of the yard. Our activity around the kiln proved too much of a fascinating distracting for the meeting attendees and we were soon surrounded by a small and curious crowed. One man began asking questions about our work; what are you doing? Is that going to light? What is this for? I tried to answer as many questions as I could, assisted by Tim, one of the Dutch students who has taken an interested in our briquetting work and knows all about the work we do.

“What’s that?” asked the man, pointing to our heat sensors that we were inserting into the wood shavings.

“That’s for measuring temperature,” explains Tim. A blank look. “To see how hot. For heat. Like a…thermometer? It tells you how much heat there is. Like, uh, how warm?” Gesturing with his hands he trails off.

“Oh, thermocouple. Ok,” the man says nodding.

I swear Tim’s jaw hit the ground. He looked quite taken aback.“Yep. That would be it. That would be the technical term.” Turning to me, “Yeah, didn’t see that one coming. Thermocouple.” Priceless.

At dinner that night, Tim told the story to the group to much laughter. “But Tim,” says Tucker. “The thermocouples say thermocouple right on them, right on the side in bold letters.” Well then. Does this make the interaction better? I don’t know but I’m still giggling.

It was a busy week of kiln burns and briquette making and briquette testing and cooking and wandering around Arusha and lots of planning. On Tuesday we re-plastered the kiln with mud mixed with lime in the hopes of preventing air leaking into the kiln once we seal it up. Our previous burns have produced a lot of ash due, we think, to leakage of air into the kiln through the walls. Lime, which consists of very small particles and is used to make concrete, ideally would prevent our mortar from cracking and would block up any holes in the kiln walls. And our theory worked! The first burn we did on Friday with the new lime plaster produced maybe 5% ash and 5% uncharred wood shavings to 90% charcoal. Sweet. Though the kiln did run for 50 hours and after 50 hours it was still hot. That’s a good sealing job we did.

On Wednesday we had our first official test of briquettes to make food by an authentic Tanzanian cook. Naiomi used 13 briquettes to cook a pot of rice. Positives: the rice cooked (to clarify, by our western standards and by Emily’s standard—she’s Chinese and cooks rice quite often so I’d consider her an authority on the matter—the rice was perfectly cooked through. However, by our cook’s standard and whose standard is the only standard that really matters, the rice was not quite done. Picky.) and there was minimal smoke. Negatives: there was smoke, and the rice took an hour to cook. Just to compare, rice normally takes 20 minutes to cook on a charcoal stove with charcoal. So not really ideal. But the briquettes she used were from all different batches that we had made, many of which had a very high cassava flour content. We think that the high levels of cassava in the briquettes caused them to smoke excessively and to burn less efficiently. So we have another batch of dry, low cassava content briquettes for Naiomi to try on Wednesday. Fingers crossed these work…

James and I had another meeting with Vision 4 Youth on Friday to talk about kiln design and the carbonization process. The group is excited to get started on their operation; funding is the only thing holding them back. After our meeting, James and I met up with the rest of our household for a night free of dish washing. Eating out is the best.

Saturday, big shower day! Clean hair feels oh so wonderful. The four of us headed into Arusha to attend the official opening of the library that we helped to paint last week. Lots of introductions, followed by speeches, half in English, half in Swahili. During the meeting, I offered a soda to a Muslim girl who was fasting for Ramadan. I felt so rude. Many apologies. Then home to a delicious Dutch dinner of mashed potato and veggies, a meat sauce, and fresh salad.

Sunday we spent the morning working on the kiln and in the afternoon Emily and I went to the Usa market. (For the second time this week. We run through veggies ridiculously fast.) To give you a sense of the prices, we bought 9 fresh bananas and 3 perfectly ripe avocados, also as fresh as you can get, for $1 USD. That’s the normal price here. Wonderful. And delicious. At 4:30 we started cooking dinner and didn’t finish until 8:15. Our finished product: 45 chapati, a veggie sauce/soup with coconut milk, and an egg, spinach, and tomato dish. It went over quite well!

Burning stuff and pressing the burned stuff was the order of the day for Monday and Tuesday. Lots of pressing. We made over 200 briquettes on Tuesday. Sweet!

Somewhere in the week we also managed to squeeze in a viewing of Indiana Jones: Temple of Doom. The music is stuck in all our heads.

Also fun fact, not that I’m keeping a tally or anything, I have received 4 offers of marriage to date. How ever will I choose? Two teachers, a rather inebriated man on a dala-dala who professed his love and asked me to “say you love me.” Get off. And the fourth a friend of our neighbor. This last man spoke almost no English and his sentiments were expressed through our neighbor acting as translator. “He says he’d like to learn about the work you’re doing and how to make charcoal and he is also looking for a fiancé. He likes you a lot.” Tucker has kindly offered to act as a stand in husband for the future. Now that will be fun to act out. I wonder how you say "Hell no" in Swahili. That will be the next word to learn. Right after thermocouple.

Out to dinner with the group! 

Making chapati with Emily. Quite the operation.

Unloading the kiln with Tucker. I stuck my hand into the bucket to check the
temperature. Yup, it was hot.

Shoveling!

Briquettes out to dry. We're getting better, our newest batches don't crumble
so much.

Just another work day in Tanzania.