Kusafiri

Kusafiri means "to travel" and safari means a "trip" or "journey". Russ and I awoke in our hotel in Dar at 4:45 am to the sound of the call to prayer in Arabic over loud speaker. It happens pretty much everyday in every mosque around. But, no biggie because my alarm was actually set for that time to wake up anyway...because the reporting time for the bus to Njombe was 5:30 am. We left at 6 am with Thomas, Brendan, Rob, and Andrew on the same bus. There are no bathrooms on the bus so you hold it until there's a bathroom break or use Imodium. The bus pulls to the side of the road in certain areas and everyone gets off the bus who needs to go. The men go to the front in the bushes and the women go to the back. I needed to go badly and wasn't sure when we'd stop again so I took my kanga and went. Pretty simple. The road to Njombe from Dar passes through Mikumi Park so when we entered I kept looking for animals. And sure enough we saw giraffes, and elephant, a chimp, and a family of warthogs! [Queue Lion King soundtrack]. I didn't bother taking pictures because our group is going to go to that same park next weekend and I'll get better views then. If you look on a map of TZ you should notice that very few roads are paved. Zambia is a landlocked country and some time ago the "Tanzam" road was built to allow Zambia access to the ocean through Dar. We took that road which has no stop lights, only really big and really small speed bumps to slow people down. We passed the park...then stopped for ten minutes to each lunch and have another bathroom break. Russ, Rob, and I risked getting sick by eating chips with ketchup wrapped in a flat fried egg. It was really good and none of us got sick. Next we went up the mountain and passed green land...then back to dry, dusty land. I noticed at one point that among all the brown there was this sort of strip of green in the distance. I figured out soon enough that in the middle of this green strip that stretched for miles was a river. We passed Iringa and got off before Njombe actually...as our shadow site was not directly in the town. We got to Ryan's site 9 hours after we started the journey, met Ryan, and got to see the place he's been living at for a year now. He's got it very nice...he's the third, and going to be the last, volunteer at that site. He has electricity, fridge, blender, and really nice furniture that a furniture fundi (fixer) made. Ryan gave us some great ideas for when we get to site. The south highlands is quite cold (60s?) and very windy. Dust was blowing everywhere which set my allergies off. I had my fleece on a lot of the time. The next day we toured Ryan's secondary school where he teaches chemistry. We also got to see the computer room that he's been taking care of supervises. The next day we went to Njombe and met up with more PCVs from around the area. PCVs are such awesome people! Then yesterday, we boarded the bus to come home...and passing through Mikumi again we saw zebras!

Now training is starting to come to an end. Tomorrow, Monday, we find out where we will all be living for the next two years, take our final exams in Kiswahili on Wednesday and Friday, then we swear in as actual Peace Corps Volunteers, then we're off to our sites in early December!