Last night I attended my farewell party and had a great evening filled with mbuzi (goat BBQ) and friends. My time in Ifakara is wrapping up and I have begun saying my goodbyes. Even though I won’t be leaving Tanzania until the end of the month, I leave Ifakara this weekend to finish up my work in Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar. I am sad to be leaving so many friends in Ifakara, but am happy remembering all the good times we had together. I am even happier I got most of my friends together long enough for one final picture:
Since my last post, I was able to go on another safari with the friends I made here. We camped in Mikumi national park and enjoyed seeing many animals. The grass was much taller than my last safari experience due to the rains, but the elephants and giraffes were still hard to miss. Sleeping in the park was an even better experience, even though the terrifying sounds the lions made kept me up half the night.
Everyone was in charge of one meal to make during our safari and I was assigned breakfast. Wanting to have a taste of home, I made American style pancakes. My Tanzanian friends called them “chapati majis” which translates to watery wafers, but they were much more appetizing than that description. While I cooked the pancakes, a herd of about 100 antelopes cruised by a few yards behind our campsite.
I traveled to Dar es Salaam once again for a few days to help at another writing boot camp. Movement in the city was paralyzed in some areas by the floods the rainy season brought (picture credit to my friend Elizabtha):
Additionally, our weekly bike tours have turned into more of a swimming exercise than biking.
In terms of the work I am doing lately, nothing much has changed. The website I have created is under review and I am implementing the suggestions I receive on how to make it better. I still cannot share the link to the site, as IHI wants to launch it on their own time. I’m not sure if the launch will be taking place while I am still in Tanzania since most of the site’s data must still be collected, but I will update this blog with the link as soon as it is available. We are just now entering the sock testing phase for the Smelly Sock Project.
As I prepare to leave Tanzania I am also getting ready for the next leg of my international experience. I plan to spend a month and a half backpacking across Europe. I’ll be traveling to the following places starting in June => London, Dublin, Galway, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Brussels, Paris, Basel, Chur, Milan, Florence, Rome. If anyone reading this has been to one of these cities and has a suggestion that I should see something, please shoot me an email!
Lastly, here are some random pictures from the last few weeks:
This was our safari guide Jimmy. I was confused why he wasn't more excited to see the hippo pool until I found out he has hippos walking through his farm almost every week where he lives.
Road to Funga was unbikable
My friend Alex and I on the dance floor at the farewell party
Friends Manu and Arnold also wanted to make an appearance on the blog
