First Impressions...

Hello!

So I've been here in Tanzania for almost two weeks, but it feels like I've been here for about four years! Just a little background: I flew into Dar Es Salaam but left the next day on an eight hour bus ride to a city in the southern highlands called Iringa. I'll be in Iringa for the next month or so, learning Kiswahili and training. I'm living with a wonderful host family, the Ngenzis, who have two little boys, three older daughters, and 20 chickens/roosters, (kukus, in Kiswahili). All reside here in the house. One of the kukus starts crowing at 4:30am. I have made it my mission to find out who it is and eat him ASAP.

My four-year old little host brother, Herry, is the cutest person in the whole world, despite a troubling obessession with firearms. We are learning our numbers together.

Tanzanian children are generally curious about white people. When my friend and I walk home from school they always scream, "mzungu!" which translates to "whitey." It gets old pretty fast. They also always say "good morning," no matter what time of day it is.

People here are also extremely laid back. Everyone is always late/missing.

Iringa itself is beautiful. The only way I can accurately describe it is that it looks like dinosaurs should be roaming around: green and hilly with rocks and palm trees. The city and marketplace are very open and crowded. Because most of us are white, the shopowners think we are rich and try to rip us off on everything, so we've had to learn to barter pretty quickly.

Personal hygeine is a little sketchy. Most toilets are holes in the ground. My host family has a tv and computer with internet but no toilet...priorities? A shower consists of a basin, a bucket and an empty water bottle. I was scared to do it at first, but it's really not as horribly terrible as it sounds. If you come here, you have to deal with looking pretty bad most of the time. I miss my hairdryer.

The bugs here are pretty crazy. It's kind of like they all took some accelerated growth hormone. I saw a snail the size of my fist and found a dead cockroach in my room that looked like something out of a sci-fi movie. When I asked my little brother about the bugs and snakes he told me that they are dangerous and would kill me. Apparently everyone here gets malaria and it's no big deal. I take a weekly pill called chloroquinine, but one of the British girls told me that it had been discontinued in England 20 years ago because it doesn't work. I sleep under a mosquito net but it's full of holes. So, uh, we'll see what happens.

The roads are unpaved and totally insane. They have ravines and rivers going through them and people drive their toyotas like 60 mph through these ditches that are the size of the grand canyon. There are also little buses called "DalaDalas" that are minivans which have been gutted and carry no less than 75 people at a time. If you ride in one you'll find yourself sitting on someone's lap with someone else sitting on your lap, getting lightheaded from the dangerous ratio of oxygen to body odor. They barrell down the dirt roads with the conductor hanging out of the sliding door, screaming at all the pedestrians. It only costs 30 cents to ride a daladala but you have to be willing to go along on all the daladala driver's errands.

The food is pretty uninspired. Nobody really strays from the rice/beans/chicken formula. They also have this stuff called ugali, which is just maize flour and water but it's denser than lead. We're supposed to stay away from fruits and vegetables because I guess we'll die if we eat them.

I'm picking up Kiswahili (which is the swahili word for swahili) pretty quickly. I think it's karma for all those years I was terrible at French. It's also pretty necessary since once we get into our villages almost nobody will be able to speak English, so this time around I'm actually doing my homework!

I apologize for the jumpy nature of this post, but I thought Tanzania would be best explained in soundbites. My address here is P.O. Box 1270, Iringa, Tanzania, so feel free to send letters, postcards, chocolate chip cookies, packages from J. Crew, etc.

Also, I will someday learn how to post pictures. But not today.