Tanzania 2- Moshi and Lushoto

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After our safari we headed to the nearby small town of Moshi. It is the nearest town for trips to Mount Kilimanjaro. We weren't actually interested in climbing it, but thought it would be nice to spend a day in Moshi just to at least see it. It was totally clouded over when we arrived, but that's not why we ended up staying for almost two weeks...

On the first morning we hit the local mzungu (foreigner) coffee shop and somehow (Tracy's so friendly!) got talking to this American guy who lives here. We took the opportunity to ask him all about Moshi and mentioned that we would be interested in volunteering somewhere just for a week or two. He happened to know of a lady that had just opened up a daycare in her garden who would probably love our help. So we set off after coffee to meet Grace and the kids. Apparently there had been a spate of child kidnappings (their organs used in witchcraft ceremonies!) and parents were worried about leaving their kids in the streets when they went off to work. Hence the need for daycare. Grace and the kids, who sang us a Swahili song, were very welcoming and we planned to see them again on monday.

The daycare was closed over the weekend so we spent most of that time uploading the safari pics and doing the blog. It really took that long. Just getting into my hotmail account took fifteen and a half minutes! Internet connection is mind-numbingly slow here. Skype is impossible to use because of the connection speed. In South America, even in the remotest of places in the jungle, they had decent internet access. I feel bad about the effect of this on Africa's economic potential.

Anyhow, we spent the next week helping out at Grace's daydare center. I wish I knew more Swahili because one little girl, Doreenie, liked to sit on my knee and poke my face and examine my skin and hair very carefully and contentedly chatter away. I think at one point (she had her fingers up her nose in demonstration) she was trying to articulate "my, what big nostrils you have", but unfortunately her delightful chatter was completely lost on me.

There were a lot of young 20 year olds in Moshi volunteering who were like, totally funny to listen to, yeah? We met a couple of US girls at Grace's, they were more than happy for Tracy and I to overlap during the afternoon, showed up with sweets for the kids and looked relieved when their shift was over. In contrast, we met the 2 girls (one Scottish, one Irish) who took things way more seriously and turned up each day with a THEME they wanted to get across to the 3-5 year olds! I don't think either of them had ever watched Sesame Street.... the theme for the first day was "Geography". Not one country, nor a letter or number, but the entire world. I think they gave up when the kids started to kick the blow up globes at each other. I was deadly curious to see what the next day's topic would be...Supply-side Economics perhaps? Anyway, it really was fun interacting with the kids and other helpers.

I am a bit embarrassed, but I actually teared up one day. Grace doesn't have much money, but she feeds the children who won't get fed at home. We were there one lunch time and we declined the food, (fried rice and beans) cos we had eaten a late breakfast and we wanted it to go to the children. However, we also felt that we might have upset Lillian, the preacher's wife who cooked the meal...so we went to Grace, who speaks English, and explained that she needn't feed us, and we hope we didn't offend Lillian. She said that she didn't want us to worry, "God will provide". Something about the way she said it was so sincere, not just a phrase, that it pushed my tear buttons and I had to come up with a lot of distracting displacement behaviour, like loud coughing and random pointing to throw her off the scent of fresh saline.

Talking of eyeballs, we had run out of contact lens solution so on Saturday we made it our goal to find some. (contact lens solution, not eyeballs) We asked at several pharmacies but the answer was no. We finally got a lead however... 'the Christian Hospital has an eye department and they probably have it'. So we took a taxi in the rain and after 10 minutes arrived at the hospital grounds. Conveniently, there was a sign for the eye pavillion just where the taxi stopped. We followed the sign and entered the 70's two-storey concrete building. The door opened into a dark empty hallway that was so creepy we both instinctively stopped in our tracks and shuffled backwards. But then we heard footsteps descending the stairwell nearby. We asked the man where the eye pavillion was. He indicated we follow him, he walked for a few minutes then pointed. We then found ourselves conveniently walking through what we feared was the infectious diseases ward towards the eye department. We passed another two dark wards, one with moaning people lying in cots. Naturally, the eye department store was closed. However, after passing through the hospital our day's priority to source lens solution felt a little frivolous and we happily hailed a taxi into town, glad that we had our health. Then we went shoe shopping. Kidding.

We said goodbye to Grace and the kids, (the kids and staff waved and waved until we were all just little dots in the distance! cute!) and then headed to Lushoto to do a little hiking in the Usambara mountains. Lushoto was picturesque but muddy. We went into the little tourist information place to find out about hikes and met a couple of germans who had just returned from a 4 day hike. They had mud up to their knees and were not overly enthusiastic about their experience. Tracy admitted in our hotel room that she's just not a bad weather hiker, that maybe we should just move on to somewhere with sun. We decided to sleep on it. Next morning it was only lightly drizzling and I (having grown up in fine drizzle) persuaded Tracy to do just a day hike. We hired a guide (though we'd have prefered hiking on our own the guidebook encourages one to hire a guide so that money is going in to the community) and set off to see the Irente viewpoint. It was magnificent and all along the way we practiced our Swahili greetings with the people we passed. Turned out to be a glorious day, but as the rain started again in the evening we decided over dinner we needed a little beach action....so the very next day we took the very early morning bus towards Zanzibar.