Across the Maasai Steppe

"I'm wide awake and so alive. Ringing like a bell. Tell me this is paradise and not someplace I fell, 'cause I keep on fallin' down. I wanna feel the car crash. I wanna feel the capsize. I wanna feel the bomb drop, the earth stop 'til I'm satisfied. I wanna let go and know that I'll be alright, alright." -Matt Nathanson

What is UP? I apologize for the lack of entries lately! I've been busy! I've actually finally gotten a few things up and running in my village with much more in the works. I started teaching Life Skills to the 7th graders and my first lesson went excellently! I continue that and start with my Peer Education/Health Club at the secondary school this week. I also have had several meetings about my orphans' chicken-keeping project and my goal is to have the grant submitted before I come to America (in just 2 weeks). Once I submit it it's up to Peace Corps how long it takes for them to post it online to be open for donations but I'll definitely update on here when it's up. Should be less than $2000 to start a sustainable project so kids can keep going to school! I also went to Iringa for a PEPFAR-sponsored HIV/AIDS training and got some good ideas there while having fun with the other PCVs. After that Bill (an Environment volunteer friend) traveled back to my village with me to help me start a tree nursery in my village. It went awesomely...we prepared an area, built a fence, gathered tons of dirt/sand/manure, prepared planting tubes, and planted 500 seeds in 3 days thanks to help from my school teachers and free child labor! That's how you get things done around here! I have awesome pictures of all the kids working away and hopefully in a few months we'll have a lot of seedlings. Doing that made me feel really great, it was awesome to finally SEE something I helped create happen in my village, even though it was really all Bill! We also are culinary masters and made calzones, enchiladas, french toast, chili and corn bread, Asian coleslaw, carrot cake, and many other things. Several included spinach from my garden which actually is growing! It DOES give you a weird hillbilly sense of pride to eat food you grew yourself. So also this week I'm going to hopefully teach permaculture gardening with my counterpart for some People Living w/ HIV, some Mamas, really anyone who wants to learn! And maybe finally get around to building a solar stove to see how it works and if I can start teaching that.

I just got back from a work trip to Arusha in the Kilimanjaro region with Keith and Heather. We went to visit with a couple NGOs that we had made contact with in order to find out about possible collaboration. Arusha was amazing but getting there was quite interesting. We got to our banking town, Kibaya, thinking that there was an afternoon bus we could take that day to continue on the journey. Of course it had crashed earlier that week so was no longer running. So after getting distracted in town by beer and soap operas for a few hours, we set out kind of late on an attempt to hitchhike. We walked about an hour outside of town and started sticking our thumbs out (actually in TZ it's this other weird arm motion). Of course, no luck, the few trucks that do pass us aren't going as far as we need to go. So we head back to Kibaya for a night and get up at 4:30 am the next morning to catch the bus to Arusha. We'd never been there before so we didn't know the route. Well, apparently there is a road directly from Kibaya to Arusha that goes right through the Maasai Steppe, pretty much the most wild and remote area in Tanzania. The bus was a piece of crap, of course, and the road was HORRIBLE. There was no way to sleep because we were bouncing all over the place for 8 hours. My arm was banging into the window so much I bruised my shoulder. But we were LUCKY because we had seats. The aisle was also packed full of standing people of course. Just to maximize casualties should there be a crash. At one point we got stuck in a pothole and had to get pulled out w/ chains attached to another truck while we almost tipped over. That's travel in Tanzania. But it was awesome in some ways because we saw SO MANY zebras!!!!!!!!! We were basically in the middle of nowhere with only tiny Maasai villages- just clusters of tiny dung huts out on the plains. So there were herds of zebras everywhere really close to the road. We also glimpsed giraffes, baboons, and dikdiks. And at no time were we in a national park. It was really cool. I love zebras. And of course we did eventually get there and met some awesome expats doing amazing work for this NGO called The Flying Medical Service. Definitely some possibilities for them to come do work in our villages, which means Keith and I might get free wine delivered via airplane and free rides in these prop planes if we feel like hopping in w/ the pilot/paramedics who fly into villages in our region to do free clinics. It's gonna be awesome. Arusha was also a really cool city although I was severely disappointed by the 12,500 shilling "Kilimanjaro nachos" which were huge but lacking adequate cheese. So REAL nachos are def on the list for my foodfest in America in just 2 weeks!!!!!!!!!!!! So, I am super excited for OHIO, the wedding, food, friends, and everything! But things are looking up here so I will definitely be back for more Peace Corps....8 months down, 18 to go.
See ya soon (some of you!)