Hey 3d! So I'm still alive. I've gotten about and hour's worth of internet the entire time that I've been here, and usually its wicked slow. Two nights ago I was just about ready to post, and then the power cut - horray disel generators!
Anyhoo, Drew Wong, our token freshman, got malaria a while back - pretty fun.
My fam came out to visit for a bit and stole me away to go on safari. Which was amazing. Serengeti national park is the coolest place. In the span of about 2 football fields, we saw a leopard in a tree, three lions chilling, and a momma cheetah and her 4 almost grown cubs hunt gazelle. We also say lions almost kill a zebra and a warthog (Pumba). My vegetarian sister was not very excited about that, but I was stoked. We had a toyota land crusier with a removable top, so you could just stand up and see all the way around you. Pretty cool - and something that dermo and I are definitely not going to be able to afford when we go off on our own and travel at the end of the summer.
Phew - 5 minutes of internet left. The computers here as a rule are horribly slow. I met a Chimp researcher (or mzungu swahili for european) and she is letting me use her computer.
Lets see - other notable highlights.
The kids in mwamgongo are really cool and fun to hang out with. We have developed a sort of gang of regulars who hang out by our house a lot and we practice swahili with. Minini, canaa and ghali are the main ones. Unfortunately when the village leader heard that kids were bothering us aka peering in windows and throwing rocks in our house, he went straight for our friends for more informtion. Unfortunatly we wittnessed his interogation methods, which was a pretty painful experience. He publically flogged minini for information - not cool. Thankfully our translator knew what to do and told the leader that we didn't want kids beaten on our behalf....
The project is wrapping up, only a week and a half more. Soon a few of us will head to Kalanzi and Mkigo (the coffee growing communities) to check them out for next year. It also looks like Louis, Zach, and I are going to be doing a 190/290 project in the fall and the winter for this project.
Tanzania is an interesting country and there are many things about america that I can't wait to go back to. The first being the concept of respecting someone elses time aka showing up to meetings on time (or at all).
We have been owned so many times this trip. Like the luxury bus that my family and I took coming back to dar. The Ac was broken and most of the windows didn't open. Also it was so luxury that it had a TV, but no headphones. Also everyone who has a TV on in their place is really proud of it and turns the volume up so loud that the speakers distort. So we were treated to 11 full hours of Tanzanian TV and an amazing Soap opera about a man who is engaged, but meets a rich lover in the big city. She then Blinds his fiancee with acid and they then imprison her in her house, don't allow her out of her room, beat her, and don't feed her. Eventually she runs away home and the lovers get married. Then you find out that the woman is really a prostitute, and they brake up and yeah its a messed up story.
best part was that most of the sound track was the same two measures, and they were played over and over again.
ok have to go
I'll try to write a more coherant post soon.
Ana, Mccauley, Jake, Ben? Are you alive?
-Parker
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