Tanzania!

 So I'm going to play a little fast and loose with the space/time continuum here and save stories from Zurich and Basel for another day, because I'm writing from an internet cafe in the middle of market day in Tengeru and Switzerland seems a little far away right now! My time in Basel was lovely, but Easyjet delayed my flight from Basel to Amsterdam for an hour and a half, while KLM bumped UP the flight to Nairobi by half an hour, leaving me an hour and a half to retreive all my stuff from Amsterdam luggage lockers, check my bags, pay my overweight baggage fees, go through security, and get to the gate. I literally ran through the airport like a crazy person, but I made it in the end. Many, many hours later...

Kilimanjaro from the plane

I know airplane pictures are a little  cliche, but seriously, Kilimanjaro through the clouds? Kind of amazing. I was utterly exhausted by this point, having been travelling for approximately 18 hours, but this perked me up pretty fast. That said, when we landed, I got an early taste of "Africa time" - there was no one there to meet me, I had no phone and 140 lbs of luggage, most of which was valuable donations. I was not thrilled. However, I had the cell phone number of Brightson aka Lema, the coordinator and the guy whose house we are living in. I got one of the staff to help me call him, and was told he would be there in half an hour, he'd had a breakdown. 45 minutes later? Another call, sorry, he'll be there in five minutes. A total of an hour and a quarter after I arrived, he showed up. Sigh. That said, we made it to Tengeru eventually.

This is the village of Tengeru on a non-market day. Market days are much more intense.

 The village is right off the highway, where you can catch a dalla-dalla or insanely packed shared van (seriously, about 20 people in a 10 person van) into the city of Arusha, about 10 minutes away. There is one main road leading away from the market area, and that's the road that we, and 90% of Tengeru, live on.

The road to our house - the paved section

Closer to the house, it looks like this

Motorcycles, or pikipiki, are a constant, dusty danger!

So the house is about a kilometer away from the main road, and to get to work or to Arusha I'll have to walk to the road, get a dalla-dalla, get off at the right place, and walk again to wherever I need to be. Those of you who have any experience of my sense of direction understand how problematic this may be. However, it help that most villages are literally a single road - even I can just about handle that.

My cohorts for the next few months - Christian and Christine.

We had lunch and then a very nice dinner that night, also with two women who were leaving the next day. The house consists of me, Christine, Christian, Lema (who is rarely there), Glory the cook, and Freddy the kind of jack of all trades 15 year old assistant. His English is kind of nonexistent and he can be a little flaky, but I absolutely adore his little sister Giftie - she's 12 and comes over to ask me to help her with her English homework - she's extremely smart.

Christine doing her best Vanna White to display our shared room - I'm on top.

My abode is now topped by a huge, princess-looking mosquito net, because I apparenty am the most delicious thing to come along in a LONG time for the mosquitos of Tengeru. I'm covered in bites already, hoping the mosquito net will help. Ouch ouch ouch.

This is Mama Gladness, Lema's mom. Is that not the best name ever?

 We also get to see Mama Gladness pretty often, who is one of the world's sweetest women. We've already started to have some long talks about religion, and she's invited me to come by soon to talk more. Her dresses are also all insanely gorgeous. Everyone has been really friendly, although the also tend to yell "Mzungu!" (slang for white person or European) in our general direction pretty frequently. Apparently it is derived from the word for spinning, and it represents the fact that Mzungus 'spin' around the world - not too bad of a description overall. You also get asked for money a lot, and little kids especially have this kind of strange attraction/fear thing going on where they want to be close to you and talk but you also clearly sort of terrify them. It's cute but it does get old pretty fast, I'm hoping it'll wane as they get more used to seeing us.

Tengeru on market day from the door of the internet cafe

Busy busy!

Gorgeous fabrics I'm hoping to incorporate into jewelry

I've already started playing a little bit with materials, including doing a quick lesson on copper cuff bracelets with Christine and Christian for practice. Today I bought some fabric so I'll be working with that to hopefully have some samples to show Crispin, the director at TAMIHA, tomorrow when we meet. At that point I'll have a better sense of what my day to day existence is going to be like for the next few months. I'm excited to get to work! Apologies for my grumpiness yesterday, it's all lifted pretty well now. If only I wasn't so itchy and I could magically get my LSE essay written by elves, things would be pretty perfect.