Tanzania

I've been in Tanzania for something like a week now.  It's been interesting, and fun.  Some things which I had gotten used to during Peace Corps really aggrevate me again, but for the most part I've been excited to enjoy a lot of things I had missed, especially food.  All the fresh tropical fruit, passion fruit juice, stoney tangawizi soda, castle milk stout, chipsi mayai, hot peppers, pilau, chai, Dar es Salaam's famous tandoori street chicken and Zanzibari seafood... so good!

Also I'm surprised how many people are around, and how some things never change.  For example, the Protein Bar and it's crappy deck furniture on the sidewalks still attracts all the Peace Corps volunteers in Dar in the evenings, with Rastafarians trying to sell crap to tourists and waitresses with more attitude than my failing form 2 students had.  Some things seem to have improved, like the sound systems on the mosques and the regulation of street vendors in the city.  Other things seem worse, like the trash all over the place, traffic jams and overcrowding of daladalas.  Overall, though, it's great to be back and see some volunteers I knew, as well as some Tanzanians I knew, especially some of the guys I lived with in Ihungo.

I've been really busy since arriving in Tanzania.  First Steve and I arranged to have suits made and went to Zanzibar for the Zanff film festival.  We saw some films, some excellent music, and a few galleries of local artists in Stone Town.  Steve went back to Dar, and I rented a bike to ride across the island, stop in Jozani forest to see the Red Colobus monkeys, stay the night at a beach and ride back the next day.  The ride was great, beaches were fantastic, and I even wound up meeting a buch of Tanzanian archeology students and their professor working on a 20,000 year old cave site.

In Dar, I've been meeting friends, old and new, searching for wedding accessories, and trying to find out what's going on at the University of Dar.  By some luck and persistence, I found a professor there who has just started teaching GIS, does contractual work with the government to solve problems such as finding water sources for Dar es Salaam, and studied at Clark.

The frustrating thing at the university was trying to find a list of faculty and their research interests or publications.  Impossible!  If there is such a document, it is highly classified, but at this juncture I doubt it's very existence.  Some things that are so simple in the USA leave you wandering from office to office for hours, finally coming back to the place where you started and nothing to show for it.  Whatever.  Should I try again in Nairobi and Kampala?  It takes a lot of patience and for some reason you're always seen as very suspicious; or Tanzanians are overly secretive.  Either way, it seems you definitely have to be on the inside of the situation to accomplish anything, or have a letter with a stamp on it.  A stamp really is necessary.  I should work on that.