An Official Log of My First Three Days

Day 1 (Fri 6/18):

So while I’m beginning my story with my first day in Arusha (technically night, and that would be Friday, June 18th) I should probably just go over quickly how traveling was. JFK was stressful, for sure. I ended up having overweight luggage. My big green bag ended up weighing 76 pounds. I promise I didn’t over pack. I didn’t even have a hard time closing the suitcase, it was just the things I brought were heavy (medicines, electronics, toiletries). So I attempted to repack and distrubte the weight better between my big blue backpack and my green suitcase, I was still 6 pounds over the 50 pounds weight limit and had to pay $100 to have my luggage classified as “heavy”. Bummer, but also my own fault. I’m not bringing nearly as much stuff back with me anyway. In terms of toiletries and medicines, whatever I don’t use will be throw out or given to someone else. Hopefully that will significantly alleviate my luggage problems.

The flight from JFK to Amsterdam was fine. A lot of the people on the plane were either returning to Amsterdam or picking up a connecting flight to an African country so I met a lot of volunteers, students, and fellow travelers. Delta also fed us really well, the food was not bad for airplane food. Another pleasant surprise.

I had a three hour layover in Amsterdam which wasn’t as bad as I expected (this was Friday morning) and as my boarding time got closer, I found more girls from my trip. There ended up being about 5 or 6 of us that were all on the same flight. The other girls were on the plane, we just didn’t link up with them until we got to Kilimanjaro. The flight down to Africa was amazing. The plane I was on was much nicer than the previous, each seat had its own personal video screen so I spent the 8 hour flight watching movies and looking out the window. At one point I looked out and I realized we were over a desert. I double-checked my flight tracking screen and it confirmed that we were flying over the Sahara Desert. I’ve never been more excited for a desolate stretch of continent in my life. It was so cool. We flew over it for a good two hours, it was so big. Finally we landed in Kilimanjaro, and were picked up by the assistant program director, Frida, and Albert, our bus-taxi man (apparently one of the few taxi drivers that we can actually trust in Arusha).



It was about an hour drive from the airport to Arusha and night had already fallen so visibility was slim. We got to the Arusha Resort Center and had dinner at like 10 pm. The program director, Roland, was there to greet us and he handed out our orientation manuals and room assignments. The complex offers hotel rooms and hotel/apartments for rent. Somehow Arcadia made a deal with the complex to allow us to stay in the hotel/apartments which are nice sized apts. They have a full living room, kitchen, pantry, basic cookware, a bathroom with a toilet sink and shower, and two bedrooms. I share a bedroom with a girl named Libby, who’s really nice and who I get along with really well. The other girl, Emily, is also really cool. She has the second room to herself.

At dinner we each received a mobile phone that we would have for the duration of our stay and Arcadia put 5,000 tanzanian shillings ($3.57) so that we could make a call home and tell our families we’re safe. The phone system only works on “top-ups” which means you put money on the phone, and your calls and texts just deduct from the balance, so it’s easy to use, and its completely commonplace. So that’s nice. It was nice that we had a link to the “outside” world right from the get-go. In the lobby building of the complex (which is walled and has a personal guard service, I hope that eases your mind, Mike!) there is the reception desk and a living room and the dining room where we eat our meals, but there is also an internet café. That entire building has wireless internet, so while others can pay to use the computers in the café, most of us just bring our laptops to the lobby and use the free wireless that’s provided. We just don’t have internet in our apartments which makes it annoying sometimes to have to lug all your laptop stuff to the other building, but I guess considering it’s Africa, I should feel lucky.

Anyway, so after moving in and unpacking a little, all of us went to bed. We had to be up at 8 for breakfast the next morning. Libby and I both struggled to sleep, and it was really stressful not being able to call my mom and let her know I was ok. I slept on and off. Partly because I was anxious and stressed and partly because I was homesick and partly because I was getting used to the noises of Arusha and the complex. The first night was hard. I won’t lie. It was really hard.


Day 2 (Sat 6/19):

Saturday started chilly. It was muggy and humid when we arrived the night before but a rainstorm had broken the heat, so I spent the day underdressed in my jeans and t-shirt. I finally figured out how to call home, another of the girls had figured it out, and I was able to connect to the internet before breakfast and update my facebook, send out some emails and all that. We had breakfast (which consisted of eggs, toast, juice, fresh fruit, and tea) and then trooped up the road into the main part of town, through it, and then to the Natural History Museum, where our classroom is located. The grounds of the museum are beautiful. There’s a small gated garden to the left of the entrance where 7-9 tortoises live, with their guards, these two ugly birds that I have no idea what they’re called. They kind of look like ugly flamingos, but with a little bit of vulture thrown in. I’m not sure what they are, but they guard the tortoises fiercely, which is pretty funny. The museum itself is a small whitewashed building with only a few rooms devoted to exhibits, and the last room being the classroom. Behind the building is a small piece of sloping land with a path that eventually leads to the Via-Via café, where apparently everyone who takes classes at the museum eats lunch every day.

The morning was devoted to different program sessions where the director, Roland, had people come and speak on various aspects of Tanzanian life and life in Arusha. They talked to us about money, banking, telephone, the program calendar, the post office and transportation. He also had a girl who had just finished the spring semester program for Arcadia, and fell in love with Arusha so much that she stayed to continue her work, come speak to us. She was our age, which was nice, since she gave us the real low-down on dealing with harassment from the locals, especially as females.

There was another speaker who came, his name was Wayne, and he was a security officer for the UN International Criminal Tribunal Council for Rwanda. That pretty much means that he is head of security and detainment when it comes to the war criminals that are charged for crimes against humanity at the Tribunal Council. He scared us all silly. He described the potential dangers and sticky situations we needed to avoid not only from a professional perspective, he’s been here in Arusha for 16 years, but also from the perspective of a father. He has a 13 year old daughter that he is raising and he has a particular investment in all of our safeties from that, which was nice. Even though we won’t interact with him every day, or maybe not even at all, he gave us free leave to call him on his cellphone at any hour if we felt we were in a dangerous situation. During the talk, he described that he is licensed to carry a concealed weapon not only in Tanzania, but in almost all 50 states and Trinidad (where he is originally from). That made me feel a lot better after having them scare us with all the bad things that could happen to us here. I think it also didn’t help that we were harassed while we were out in the street walking up, and then during the walking tour. Just approached and asked to buy things from street vendors and the like. We are pretty hard to blend in, since we are a group of 17 mostly white females who are clearly tourists.

Nonetheless, knowing we had someone to protect us if we needed it was reassuring. Then a white woman from the local hospital came to talk to us. She was funny too. She was like our pretend-white-mother, and Wayne was pretend-black-father. She and her husband are from the states but do Lutheran missionary/healthcare here in Arusha at the hospital and they have raised a family entirely in the town. The one daughter she brought along actually grew up in Arusha her whole life, and the first time she ever left was last year when we left for college, which was an interesting perspective. They talked to us about malaria and getting testing if we come down with a fever.

They then treated us to lunch at Via-Via and then we went back to the classroom for Kiswahili lessons from Mwalimu (teacher) Almasi. He’s a funny dodgy man. He’s been teaching Kiswahili for almost 25 years to foreigners so he’s really good at it. He gave us like an hour and a half lesson on basic phrases and grammar and then took us on a walking tour of the main part of town. By that time, and since it was a Saturday, everything was closed, but we still got a sense of where the important buildings were, like the post office and the banks, and the phone place where we can put money on our phones.

We got back to the Arusha Resort Center, as its formally known, and had some free time before dinner. We get two meals a day, we always get breakfast, and then we get to choose whether we want lunch or dinner, the third meal is on us to figure out. Since its easiest to grab a quick lunch near the classroom, we decided as a group to do dinner at the complex. We eat dinner at 7 pm sharp everyday at this long table. It’s really nice because we all get to sit together and talk and hang out with each other.

After dinner I brought my computer down to the room and spent a good chunk of the night sending out emails and trying to get Skype to work. Rich and I finally managed to skype, which was so nice after not seeing him for a while, and so we chatted until it was time for me to go. They close the internet café at 10pm and then the whole lobby building at midnight so primo communication hours are non-accessible because it’s nighttime here, but afternoon and night at home.

I finished unpacking, took my first shower here (it was cold) and settled into bed to write in my journal. It had been a pretty serious rollercoaster, the entire time I’d been here, and I finally felt settled and clean and ready for a good nights rest. Unfortunately, I did not get that. I fell asleep at around 12:40 am, only to wake up at exactly 1:41 am thinking I’d slept through the night. I woke up and was wide awake. Fortunately, Libby also couldn’t sleep so while she was able to drift off at one point for another hour, we literally spent the whole night talking and playing games on our respective iPods because neither of us could sleep. I finally fell asleep at 6:30 am only to have to wake up out of legitimate sleep at 8 for breakfast. I’m working on 6 hours of sleep since Thursday, so I plan on taking some NyQuil tonight to force my body to shut down. It still seriously thinks we’re on East Coast time. When I fell asleep at 6:30, it was 11:30 pm back home.

Day 3 (Sun 6/20):

In any case, today dawned bright and sunny, the first time I’d seen the sky since I arrived. We had morning orientation some more where we met our instructor and talked about the expectations of the course. We had another Kiswahili lesson before our director took us out for our last free lunch before we have to take care of it ourselves. Most of us spent the afternoon doing the readings for class tomorrow. There are a lot of them. I’ve just been relaxing and trying to not stress too much. This weekend was really crazy for me. I like it here, but it was really hard to accept the fact that most of my time would be spent feeling uncomfortable. I guess that’s part of the experience, figuring out how to thrive and make the most out of this experience and be completely out of my element.

We had a really beautiful view of Mt. Meru today because there weren’t as many clouds covering it. I’m starting to really like it here, and I know I’ll only enjoy it more as time goes on but I definitely am feeling homesick and lonely. The girls in my program are also really nice and supportive. I tried not to show how homesick I was to them, because none of the rest of them showed it, until last night when this one girl, Alex, who saw me start to cry as I got off the phone with my mom and pretty much said that she was in the same place. She was really homesick, and her first night was rough too. It came up later that most of the girls had a sort of rough first night, which made me feel better. Its nice to know that I’m not the silly little kid of the group, homesick for their mom.

Dinner tonight was really nice, we had gazpacho in avacados, then coconut fish, pepper steak, and vanilla ice cream. Yummm. I’m now hanging out in the internet café, hoping my family turns on skype since I will get kicked out around 5pm their time. Oh well. I hope you enjoyed this post. I know it was long but this is generally the way I write, in intense detail.

Love you and miss you all!

Colleen