From Moro to Moshi and everywhere in-between

Hey everyone,
Site visits have pretty much come to an end. After an 8 hour bus ride on a sweltering bus, I am sitting in an air-conditioned internet cafe in Dar. Life is good. Except I'm in Dar. But AC is kicking ass right now. So I travelled to a town about an hour from Mt. Kilimanjaro to visit a volunteer up there. Mwanga is really pretty area up near Mt. Kilimanjaro. It's gorgeous. Our host was a fabulous cook and we ate some ravioli, some pumpkin pie, some pudding, some rattitoui. And got to see Mt. Kilimanjaro.

The most exciting part of the whole trip was that I was talking to a teacher at my host's school and he was from the area in Mbeya where I am heading in 10 DAYS! He says that it is very similar to the Kilimanjaro area, which is awesome. But besides that good news and some great food: we had a super eventful 5 days.

We arrived at the site last Wednesday night. Getting there from Moro consisted of a 7 hour bus ride to the base of a mountain. And then a 45 minute daladala ride up the mountain. When we arrived, we met our host's neighbors "babu" and "bibi" who are really nice, cooked some food, and went to bed. The next day was Thursday, so our host had school. We went to school with her and watched her teacher - three Form 1 Math classes on surface area. Exciting stuff. The students are great and wanted us to teach them songs. We taught them the chicken dance, and since they knew Old Mc.Donald and the Hokey Pokey, we let them "teach" those songs to us. After that, they all wanted pictures with us, so we used our host's camera to get millions of pictures with all the students.

Thursday night was quite an adventure. We went to bed at the normal time. It is the beginning of the short rainy season here, so things are coming to life. Around 4 in the morning we hear this crazy buzzing around us. I look around, and no lie - there's about 400 kumbekumbe flying around our heads. I'm not sure what they're called in English but they're like flying termites. And they were EVERYWHERE! We had left the outside light on, whcih they were attracted to, and apparently the back door isn't kumbekumbe proof so they just came right in. So we found brooms and books and flyswatters and started swatting away. We also turned off the porch and house lights, turned on the choo light (about 10 feet away) and opened the door, hoping they'd leave. About and hour later, problem solved. But it was too late to go back to bed. We made some chocolate pudding for breakfast and sat around like zombies until we had to go to school.

Friday was similiar to Thursday, except that I was pretty sick and skipped all but one class. No biggie, I have a cough, running noise, all those fun things. I'll survive. No worries.

Saturday, we took a bus into Moshi, the city right at the base of Kilimanjaro. It was kind of crazy how touristy it was. I haven't seen that many wazungu in one area for a long time. It was strange atmosphere. We met up with a ton of people there, went to dinner. A lot of people went to a club afterwards, but since I still felt kind of like death, I stayed in and went to bed. I hear the club was a mini Las-Vegas with slots, and bubble machines, and fog machines and basically every cheesy-awesome effect you can get. I'm not too upset I missed it. The next morning, I had a VANILLA milkshake and pizza for breakfast (Mom and Dad, aren't you glad you taught me such great nutrtion?) And then we headed back to our host's house.

This is were things got a little not-as-great. My camera was stolen when I was gone :(. Which means that someone got into our host's house when she was gone. Hmm. It really weird because the only things missing are my camera (not the memory card that was in the camera or the bag that the camera was in-weird huh?), 10000 TS /= (less than 10 dollars) and our host's battery charger...but my camera didn't have rechargeable batteries. Nothing else: including 40,000/= in my backpack, our host's IPOD right next to her battery charger, her passport or money. ODD. Today, our host spoke with the mkuu at her school and babu and bibi. I hear in a small village, things have a way of showing up. So I haven't totally written my camera off yet. Mungu akipenda.

So yea, thats about it. Everything else is stellar. Apparently people have had some trouble calling me from America. Sorry. Keep trying, I'd love to hear from you in the next 9 days when I have guaranteed cell service...who knows if my site will!

Love and miss you all!