Where is the rice?! Why do we have no rice?!

Day 13 (6/30):

The mornings have become routine here. After our break at 11:30, our program director Roland had two speakers come to talk to us about their organizations. The one woman was an intern for the Tribunal Court, and the other was a friend of hers from a local Women’s Advocacy organization called WEEC. I don’t remember what each letter meant, but they essentially worked in the Kilimanjaro region with women from local villages to empower them and allow them to be in charge of the money they earn from the small businesses they begin. The organization was started by a large, brash, Tanzanian woman, and the lady who came to talk to us runs the sister organization in Boston that raises money for the Micro-loans that WEEC gives out. It was a pretty neat program, since it’s all about empowerment and allowing the women to be in control of the business they run and the money they make.

After the presentation we all headed back to my apartment and had leftover Chinese from the night before. SO GOOD. From lunch we headed up to the Peace Research Center to meet with the man from one of the volunteer organizations (Hurepi) about setting up a schedule for the week. He talked about us doing human rights education programming, like learning to build programs for human rights education in primary schools. Teaching children about basic human rights. It was pretty cool. We split up the days so that everyone would get an equal amount of days.

When I got back to the apartment later that afternoon I decided to do laundry. There are two ways of doing laundry here, either you wash it by hand, or you pay to have the hotel wash your clothes. It’s expensive to have them cleaned so I figured I’d take a shot at washing my own clothes. Despite the actual physical labor involved, which I didn’t expect, I kind of liked it. We have a pantry closet in the kitchen for dry foods, but we don’t use it, so the slatted shelves are perfect drying racks for clothes. I boiled a couple kettles of water and poured it into this large plastic basin we were given. I let my clothes soak in the water with soap I brought (camping soap, specifically for travel) and then used this big wooden spoon I found to stir it. After I let it soak for a while, I pulled out each piece of clothing one by one and scrubbed it under cold water in the sink. I wrang it out and hung it up. I was pretty proud of myself to say the least. It was hard, though, when I folded all the dry clothes this morning because the pile was teeny-tiny. I thought I’d done so much more, but I really hadn’t washed that many clothes. Oh well, it was a good learning experience.

Back to Day 13. In the middle of doing laundry I had music on, and when I was soaking my clothes I would work on my gift list on my computer. Unless you’re on your A-game here, they will swindle the heck out of you, so I broke down the things I wanted to buy in specific trips with specified prices I wanted to barter for. I love organizing my life.

After spending the afternoon doing housework, essentially, I got on the internet and was able to check out my brother’s wedding pictures. They were amazing. It made me so happy to look at them, not only because it meant the internet here was fast enough for me to load the pages, but also because it was nice to relive such a fun night.

After dinner I chatted with two girls in my group, Katy and Alex, and we were able to joke about the whole camel trip and how anxious and crazy I was on the bus ride there. It was pretty funny. I got to be the person who freaked out the most, so Katy and Alex could just laugh at me because they knew someone was more freaked out than they were. We were cracking up about it for a good twenty minutes.

By the time I got back to my room, Libby and I decided to do a huge music swap, so we did that for most of the rest of the night. I have almost all of Jay-Z’s music now. All of it. And The Roots. I’m very excited, to say the least. I have 600 new songs to listen to. Yeah!!!

After music trading, we both showered and then headed to bed. It was a pretty low-key night.



Day 14 (7/1):

Today dawned kind of cloudy, it had been really sunny outside for the past few days. Breakfast and class were the same as usual. During the break I talked to my professor about the research paper we have to write. He helped me narrow down my topic to doing domestic violence in the household. I’m pretty excited about it.

When we were leaving the classroom, we were told we had a speaker coming at 2 that we didn’t know about and we all freaked out because we hadn’t had much notice and we had all been working really hard this week to get the volunteering situation set up. We then learned that we had a KiSwahili lesson the following day, again during volunteering hours. Everyone freaked out but the self-appointed leader of the group said she would go and talk to our program director about giving us notice and stuff. I decided to forego volunteering in favor of the speaker. Roland and Frida set these speakers up for us for a reason and I would have felt bad not showing up when these people donate their time.

The speaker was good, she came to talk to us about a volunteer organization that helps women in the community with legal aide and the rights they have in their marriages. They do really good work, but they don’t receive any governmental funding, it’s all donor-based money.

The two other girls who were volunteering at Hurepi decided to go there instead of seeing the speaker. They were going to walk the few kilometers and see where it was and just figure it out in general. The man from Hurepi had told us the day before that it was safe to walk, so we trusted his judgment. Apparently not. The girls walked for almost an hour, through town, being followed by multiple groups of men and boys, and they didn’t even find the place. They called the man from Hurepi and he must have gotten frustrated with them because he hung up on them. It was a pretty dicey situation, I’m not going to lie. I was really happy that I decided to see the speaker instead of going with them. It would have freaked me out. They were really freaked out when they got back. They ended up calling one of the cab-drivers we can trust, Albert, and pretty much as soon as he heard where they were, he said he would pick them up immediately. Albert was literally a life-saver in that situation and I’m glad we have him around. He rocks.

In any case, they were safe, but they definitely will not be repeating that experience again.

After hearing their story, we went grocery shopping. I picked up croissants for my nutella. My favorite breakfast treat. We hung around the apartment for the afternoon. I cleaned up my music selection and organized it, and Libby and Emily just hung out and traded music between them.

Emily had bought a bottle a wine and stuck it in the fridge earlier in the afternoon so we could have a glass of wine before dinner. I accidentally knocked over the wine glass with my computer which splashed all over Libby’s Mac. I went into instant panic mode. I freaked out and then once we had gotten it reasonably dry, we went back to the grocery store so that we could get rice to let it sit in overnight. I’m hoping that will work at removing any moisture from under her keyboard. She took it in stride though, and apologized for the millions of apologies I gave her. I’m lucky to have such easy-going apartment-mates. That was pretty much our excitement for the day, pretty much. The wine on the computer and the Hurepi incident. Things are exciting here, but that’s pretty much my status report.

I’m going to head out and do some reading tonight.

Love and miss you all!

Colleen