Good morning Mazungu!

Last week was a long one. With the Arusha team coming to Mwanza to see the community kitchen today, much of last week was spent sifting through a massive file cabinet of important documents and sorting through online documents, in an attempt to comprise a manual for their visit. With some documents in Swahili and some in English, translating was a tedious process. While I sat at the dining room table with my laptop and a daunting stack of papers, Steph and Kathryn, the nutrition students, and Aria and Yolanda, our Dutch friends who are medical students, were making mass batches of yogurt in the kitchen; Steph for an upcoming sensory evaluation and Aria and Yolanda for a study on the benefits of adding maringa to the probiotic yogurt. As I comprised documents of budgets, inventory, summaries of the project and contact lists I witnessed batch after batch of yogurt go bad for the interns in the kitchen due to bad milk. They spent the entire day with the only tangible outcome being a cup of hot coco for all.

That day was actually fairly productive for me, going with Esther to view hotel options to accommodate the Arusha team and managing to comprise most of the manual and itinerary. Still, it is hard to be indoors when it is so nice out, and after a full day in the apartment we all needed a dinner out, followed by ice cream at Salama’s corner, a favourite spot of ours.

The next morning I realized that I was missing the chart of measurements that needed to be included in yogurt making process for the manual, so I accompanied the others to the kitchen to copy down the information I needed. While they stayed for the morning in their second attempt at the yogurt I returned home to finalize things for the Arusha visit. Even though I have done the walk to and from Mabatini where the kitchen is located I still love hearing the children who, regardless of what time of day always squeal, “Mazungu! Good morning, how are you?!” It can be evening and it is still always good morning. They’re very cute and they’re always shocked if you respond in Swahili, often erupting in giggles. The laneway of Mabatini is always bustling with people selling mostly clothes and food, though I recently discovered that for only 1200 shillings you can have a CD of ”bongo flava” music burnt for you. I love that there is always music playing along the streets, and I find the mixture of “bongo flava” and famous American hip hop and rap quite amusing.

Over the weekend I took a spontaneous trip to a national park called Rubondo Island with one of our local friends, Major, who owns a shipyard in Mwanza, and a group of international students from France, the Netherlands and Germany. The other interns from Western could not come because they were busy with their sensory evaluations, but having finished my work for the week, I decided to go anyways, making me the only native English speaker in the group. Having made a last minute decision to go on the trip I did not know much about it, including the fact that it was over a seven hour trip to get there! It was well worth it though because the scenic drive was incredible and the final destination more so.

With eleven people between two cars, seven of us plus our food for the weekend crammed into the one I was driving in, we drove an hour to a ferry which took us across a small stretch of Lake Victoria. As we continued the long drive after the ferry, two of the men fiercely sucking back cigarettes in the front despite my warning that if they keep this up they’ll be dead by twenty-five, I couldn’t help feeling like I was in an Indiana Jones movie, driving along a dirt road that only got more rural and remote as we drove on. While Mwanza is a relatively big city, with apartments, or houses with tin roofs, the villages along the road we were driving on were far more primitive. I was so fascinated by the dramatic change from Mwanza that I kept my eyes glued out the window as we drove by mud huts with straw roofs and cows, chickens and goats roaming freely along the side of the road. Even the occasional monkey would dart across the road. We all got a good laugh as the roof of the car in front of us popped open going over a bump and two live chickens popped out. We swerved to avoid them and they simply strutted off to the side of the road unharmed.

A good indicator of how far we had ventured outside of the city, was peoples reaction our group of eleven Mazungus, especially the children. As we drove the kids would shriek of laughter and even run alongside the car pointing. It made me realize that it would be extremely difficult to assimilate into Tanzanian culture or ever be considered a local, if one chose to move here. Our friend Jacque best exemplifies this thought. As a native South African, who has been living in Tanzania for over five years, he is fluent in Swahili, dresses like all the other men here, and follows many cultural practices. Still, because he is white he is immediately marked as a Mazungu wherever we go. It is a strong contrast from Canada, which in comparison is extremely diverse and multicultural.

After six hours of travel, we arrived in a tiny local village, where we parked our cars and took about a forty minute boat ride small fishing boat to Rubando island, where we saw a pack of hippos as we drifted into shore. From the shore we piled into another jeep and drove deeper into the forest, stopping occasionally to get a better look at the monkeys, birds and deer, or bushbugs as they call them here, that lined the tiny path we were driving along. We finally arrived at the cabins we were staying at and the view was incredible. It looked out onto the vast water of Lake Victoria, where hippos were once again swimming. Since our cabins were truly surrounded by the jungle, we would see massive lizards and more monkeys whenever we looked closely. Since it was late by the time we got in, we lit a campfire and struggled to come up with a song that, between the four different languages we spoke, all knew to sing. We were left with slim pickings, consisting of a few Beatles songs, some Queen and a bit of the Temptations. It was fun to be with such a multicultural group.

The next day was spent on the boat fishing and sightseeing. On his first cast Major caught a 22 kilo fish, which back on shore I took on the task of gutting.


We ate fish for lunch and dinner both days and still only got through half of the fish. In terms of sightseeing on the boat the wildlife was incredible. I was especially shocked when a group of three crocodiles waddled into the water only a few meters ahead of us as we pulled into a bay. We ended the weekend with a three hour hike through the forest before the long trip back home.

Unfortunately the excitement we were all still feeling on the ride home after having such an incredible weekend was damped but a disturbing drive home. Only about an hour away from home as I was looking out my window, I spotted what looked like a dead man laying on the side of the road and another body about twenty feet ahead. They had clearly been hit by a car, however I still don’t know if they were dead or severely injured because we just kept driving. Despite my pleas to stop the car, Jacque explained that because the judicial system is so corrupt, if we stopped we would likely be implicated in the accident and thrown in jail. I supposed that was why no one had already stopped, but the fact that two bodies lying on the side of the road was taken so lightly, and seemed to be commonplace here upset and disturbed me. It was a rude awakening to the corruption that is so rampant here. Similarly, as we drove through the roundabout only a couple hundred meters away from our house there was a man who had been severely beating and robbed just sitting in the middle of the road, as if begging to be hit by a car. Again, the fact that Jacque refused to stop for similar reasons, I had trouble accepting.

On a lighter note, I went to greet Emily at the airport the next morning and it is so nice to finally have her here! Since the Arusha team is coming today, Emily’s introduction to Mwanza was slightly more compressed than mine and we got straight to work. We were still able to take her to the kitchen and run the usual errands of exchanging currency and buying a cell phone, and yesterday we were even invited to a Sukimo tribe dance by some of the people I went away with last weekend. It was a lot of fun and the dancers were extremely energetic. One of their dances that was traditionally performed after yielding a good harvest involved a massive boa constrictor that happened to slither a little too close for my liking.
As we hurried home from the show, Emily and I eager to finish our business plan that we had put on hold to attend the dance, we arrived only to realize that we had locked ourselves out of the apartment, accidentally having taken the wrong key. Luckily our housekeeper Margret has a copy of our key, and thankfully Puis, our lovely taxi driver knew where she lived. It actually turned into quite an adventure, trecking it up to her house located on top of the huge hill that surrounds Mwanza. Whenever I walk to the kitchen I am always amazed by the way little houses are woven into the rock, but I had never actually been on the hill. The houses were much smaller than I expected and mostly made out of cement, but they were well kept. After finally making our way up the hill to Margret’s house she ended up not being home. After waiting outside of her house for about half an hour however, she came home, laughing hysterically at us when we told her our predicament.

When we finally got into our apartment, Emily and I had a late night ahead of us. Our excitement clouded our fatigue however, and it was not until we hit the sheets and immediately fell asleep that we realized how tired we had been. The late night paid off though because we are ready for visit! Karibu Mwanza Arusha team!