Tagged: Arusha

VIDEO: We, dada, wewe… (You, sister, you…)

We dada, wewe… (You sister, you…)

THE SINGING. Still brings me tears.

Video from Tanzania in 2006 – I was sixteen, it was my first time traveling on my own, and my first time in Tanzania. I spent three months – volunteered in an orphanage, taught English, went on a safari, saw some chimps in the mountains. Sometime later that year, I threw a bunch of the video clips together and backed it with some of the kids singing, from the background of other clips…

I don’t have the original video files anymore (a fact which also makes me want to cry), but… the singing! Really wished I’d recorded more of it…

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That time I almost died from typhoid fever in Tanzania…

“Do you believe in God?” She was earnest. She wielded a clipboard.

A grin skipped up beside. “Ca va?” He sounded young. A green mask covered half his face but I remember him grinning. From my back, on a bed, in a hallway, I replied automatically. “Comme ci, comme ca.”

The doors opened. “It is time, Miss Tankard.”

Lights, white tile, stainless steel. I remember the windows. It hurt, so they found another vein. An older voice told me to picture a happy place – to imagine my family – and they counted, backwards.

The grin on the left waggled a vial. “Maziwa…”

I swam upwards to translate. “Milk?” Split second having managed it, before she came in from the right, put her face to my ear, and whispered through her mask.

“Believe, Miss Tankard, believe. He is real.”

And then I was out. Continue reading

Just ask. You’re in the right place, so ask, and keep asking.

I came to Arusha over a week ago to attend the East African Association of Palaeoanthropology and Palaeontology Conference.

It was incredible.

It was inspiring – and intimidating – incredibly, intimidatingly, inspiring.

Richard Leakey gave the opening address; the conference was, in honour of the 50th anniversary of Mary Leakey’s discovery of the Zinjanthropus fossil. Thursday we made a pilgrimage to the exact site it was found, in Oldupai Gorge. Monday to Wednesday we sat in a freezing room in the basement of a generic hotel listening to many of the most famous scientists in the discipline.

“This conference is going to be very well attended. You’re going to get to meet some amazing people,” the archaeologist (rock art researcher, with whom I’d come to volunteer) told me earlier in the week. It was… Continue reading

Habari tena – from Arusha

I wasn’t really ready to leave Kikatiti – it had just begun to feel like home – but I’m excited about going to Mahale. It doesn’t feel like I’ve been here three weeks, either.

I’m in Arusha now. I’ve got a private room in the Meru House Inn (I splurged and spent a whole extra dollar for the luxury; at $7 I thought it would be ok with my budget) which is a great place. Arusha is a lot smaller than Dar but it’s quite international (it’s the stopover for all safaris and climbs) and even seems to have a large traveling-volunteer population. (All of the internet cafes and bakeries have discounts for volunteers, too.)

A couple of nights ago I opened up the pack of Sticky notes… Continue reading