Dar es Salaam Diary

I only thought I was kidding... but here I am, writing this post from my color-coded cabin (go Green!!!) after a tasty dinner in the dining hall and a day that included activities such as a group sing-a-long. I suppose one major difference is that Swahili Summer Camp has such amenities as wireless Internet (and a bar on-site), but still...

Anyway, the MS Training Centre for Development Co-operation (a.k.a. camp) is located just outside of Arusha, which is a city in the northeast part of the country, near the border with Kenya as well as Mt. Kilimanjaro. So, getting here was a bit of an ordeal: 10 and a half hours in an un-airconditioned bus. Fortunately I am a veteran of the Chinatown, so it really wasn't too bad. And the scenery as we got closer to Arusha was really incredible -- lush, green, and just vast. Our journey was somewhat delayed at the first weigh station. Apparently the bus was overweight, so they made about 10 passengers get off and then weighed the bus again. According to my seatmate Bakuza, this was to show that it was not the luggage that was making the bus overweight, but the passengers. This didn't really make sense to me (maybe has to do w/ distribution of weight?) but it all worked out eventually and we got back on the road (with all of our portly passengers) after about half an hour.

I didn't get to see much last night as we arrived after dark (I actually had to bust out my headlamp to get from the road to the reception area!) but today I have enjoyed wandering around in during class breaks. It's really a different climate from Dar, definitely cooler, and as mentioned above, very green. The whole grounds are also just very nicely kept, with distinctive touches like a big "banda" where we all break to drink our chai, and little gazebos to facilitate studying outside. We're well off the road, so it's very quiet apart from the crickets (cicadas? something else?) and monkeys (!) at night.

As for the other "campers" -- there are 11 of us total in the Beginner's class, quite a varied bunch. My classmates include a nun (Sister Mary Magdalena) who is also an X-ray technician, a Swiss girl spending her "gap year" coordinating the nursery school on a coffee plantation, a German psychiatrist who looks to be about 12 years old until you get really close to her, and then two older couples. I'm the only American.

We didn't really do much today in terms of learning Swahili -- it was all more orientation stuff. But we did learn about 10 different ways of saying hello, my favorite of which is the slangy "Mambo!" (the appropriate response to which is "Poa!" or "Fresh!")