dodoma for christmas

I'm here in Dodoma with Dan, Anna, Courtney, and of course, Russ. It's really good to see some familiar faces! We all have pretty interesting stories and I'll just list a few in no particular order...

We can get mangoes in our village and they cost 200 T.Shs (or 20 cents each!).

Russ and I made spaghetti last week and it was awesome! All the fruits and vegies are fresh here and taste so good...we made sauce from scratch...

We get a liter of milk daily but I don't drink any partly because it's whole milk and I got diarrhea the last time I drank it. We bought an egg tray in town and some eggs. Apparently when someone sells eggs they use the tray so as we were carrying this tray of eggs through town our whole village was laughing at us thinking the wazungu were selling eggs! Mom - talk to Anna's mom - she sent Anna an egg carrying case which is like a little plastic purse. Maybe you could find out where Anna's mom got it and send us one!

There was an issue at our school a few weeks ago. Apparently the boarding girls from Forms 5 and 6 did not do their cleanliness activities and therefore were not given dinner. Well, they were hungry so they started to bang on the doors and made a lot of noise. The principal was called and things were figured out. The girls ended up eating dinner but some where suspended from school for a few days.

Russ wants to build a pizza oven and raise bees for honey and wax.

Our neighbors have pigeons in a sort of chicken coop outside. I believe they eat them like they would chickens.

We have a hibiscus tree outside our window and I'm hoping my plumeria twig will grow up so i can plant it!

We are going to hire an mzee, old man, to help us out when school starts. He will clean and cook us lunch. He, like many tanzanians, have a hard time distinguishing "r"'s and "l"'s...so sometimes i'm called Risa and sometimes Russ is called Lassi.

Finished Guns, Germs, and Steel...good book...it reminded me a lot of Age of Empires when reading it!

We had a huge rain storm the other day. First the winds blew from the East and caused the dirt in the roads to swirl up a hundred feet or so. Then the rains came and we found out that there is a leak in our ceiling in the kitchen. The water just sprinkles through. It will be fixed after Christmas.

You wouldn't know it was Christmas except for the one radio in the soko (market) that plays Christmas songs.

Dodoma has so many more things that our little village so we have a big ole list of things to buy. The other pcvs are being so nice as to follow us around while we gather things they already have from the pcvs they replaced. Russ has a cell phone! Email me for the number. We should be able to make it to Dodoma about once a month so expect an update to this blog or replies to emails about every month. I found a great internet cafe here and it has made uploading pictures a lot quicker.

Courtney, Anna, and Dan are doing well. Anna has two mosquito nets up because of the mice and bugs at her home. She has no electricity and sleeps with a flashlight and phone under her pillow. She would like to get a cat, like many PCVs, to get rid of the mice. I thought we had it bad with just roaches! Courtney is nice enough to share her space with us all. Dan locked himself out of his house...briefly... ah yes, typical Peace Corps stories.

Hopefully we'll get a radio while in town so that we can actually hear news and know what's going on in the world!

Small world: So we all went out to eat last night at a restaurant and saw two wazungu women sipping wine and talking. After a while, and listening to our conversations, one girl came over and asked if we were Peace Corps Volunteers. So we said "yeah!" and she said she was Emily and her friend, Alli, just finished their PC service in Ghana and were travelling for a few months before heading back to the states. Emily is from the same town as Brendan and actually saw him at the PC office in Dar last week!