The first two days!

Hey everyone!!!

I made it safe and sound! I honestly can’t believe I’m here. It still feels so surreal to me to finally be back in Tanzania. I arrived at the dorm at 5 last night, which I still do not know what time that is in the U.S. After 2 days of traveling, 20 hours in flight, and very little sleep( who sleeps on airplanes when there are so many movie and tv options) we arrived at the dorms. Anastasia, also known as tasi, and I got a prime piece of real state for our dorm room…it is on the 7th floor! Which means that we don’t have to worry about bugs and mosquitoes as much, for it is not in their best interest to fly 80ft off the ground, we also have a ocean view from our balcony(see attached photo) and it also means that we got to carry all of luggage up 8 flights of stairs! The room is wonderful and last night we were serenaded to sleep by frogs and woke up this morning to people laughing. I can hear running water from my room but I am still not sure what the source of that water is. It is so lush and tropical here and the weather is not nearly as bad as I had thought it was going to be…or at least yesterday was not bad. It is very humid, but there is a breeze. I think the breeze is going to save me. It cools down at night and it is 10 am and it is still not very hot.

I took my first shower today and I was shocked at how cold the water is…it sure did wake me up and I think I will be taking much shorter showers here. In and out as quickly as possible, but the water pressure was great.

I loved flying emirates, it is like a five star hotel. We were served two meals on our flight from NYC to Dubai and then 1 meal on our flight from Dubai to Dar. The food was amazing!!!! It’s better than Mt. Holyoke food by a long shot and it was on an airplane!!! I could believe it. The ceiling on the first plane had sparkly, specs of light resembling stars. There were at least 50 new movies and that is not including 100 of other movies and shows. I will never get over how awkward it is to watch emotional movies on the plane. Whether they make me laugh or cry I always feel so awkward, because I am surrounded by other people who have no idea what is going on. I could not help myself I just kept laughing out loud. So I traveled with Tacy, another girl on my program. We didn’t sit together on the airplane, but it was nice having someone to travel with. So in our layover in Dubai, we found our gate and then sat down and talked and got to know each other better. We were having a great time and we decided to walk around to keep our legs from cramping. We look at the info screen to make sure we were at the right gate and no were not and it said final call!!! We ran to the new gate and everyone had already been seated and we were the last two people on the plane. It was so ridiculous we got there 10 minutes before were suppose to depart, my clock was wrong, very wrong. Other than that little excitement, our journey was perfect and went very smooth.

Today I am going to meet my Swahili teacher’s little brother and deliver a laptop that I brought for him. I think that tacy and I hopefully will be invited over for dinner! We are going to go explore the campus some, throw around my Frisbee and maybe then try to find an internet café so I can send this very long, incoherent message to all of you! My goal is to write at least one entrée for the blog every week if not more.

I am so excited and can’t wait for the true adventures and semester to begin. The other students arrive today and we start class/orientation on Monday.

Take care
Mary

Yesterday was great! Tacy and I were basically alone exploring the campus…we went walking for 2 hours and I am burned to a crisp, on the first day! I think I will be getting pretty tan, pretty quickly. There are monkeys all over campus. Wema, my Swahili teacher, her little brother came to pick up the computer that I carried for her. We all just walked around campus and talked…it was very ackward, but nice to get out with people who kind of knew what they were doing. They hasn’t spent much time on campus and didn’t know where much was. So we all explored together. Tacy got the pleasure of riding on a Dala Dala, local bus, for the first time. It was pretty painless compared to my other experiences. I then taught them how to throw a Frisbee, and let’s just say they are naturals…which annoys me since it took me forever to learn how to throw. They had never seen a Frisbee before and could throw fairly well, even a forehand! After they left, we were greeted by one of the security guards that had asked for Tacy’s number earlier, we told him we did not have a phone. So when we walked over and our security guard mama zubeta asked us if we had a phone and I told her we did, we were caught in our lie, expect that Tacy really did not have a phone. He then proceeded to try and sell her phone. When we asked for how much he told her just to check out the phone. When we decided it worked, we then asked how much. He asked her what she was willing to spend. I then intervened and began negotiating, and was then called a unfamiliar word in Swahili. I asked what it meant and it apparently it means “technical”-I am not sure if that is the real translation, but we had such a good time bargaining and talking with them. I then proceed to tell them how I didn’t want to have children, which then led to the logical question of “do you want to be a sister?” meaning do I want to join the nunnery. I said no and then they asked if I planned to get married I said yes. They then laughed and asked me what I thought my husband would think. He asked me if I would then have an abortion every time I got pregnant, and so I tried to explain birth control and condoms and then it got to awkward and I changed the subject.

More stories to come I promise\
Mary