Birthday Weekend in Zanzibar

For my birthday this year, Lucy surprised me with planning a trip to Zanzibar to go swimming with giant sea turtles at the Chumbe Island Coral Park off the western coast of the island.  I returned from the field early Friday morning 28 January, had a few meetings in the office, and picked up Lucy to get on the last ferry of the day to Zanzibar (4pm).

We arrived in Stone Town around 6pm to make the sunset at the Africa House Hotel.

Kilimanjaro Half Marathon

After a few weeks of training (Lucy) and trying not to be hobbled by said training (Jon), Lucy and I are running the Kilimanjaro Half Marathon this weekend.  Lucy is in prime shape and ready to tackle part of the highest mountain in Africa (from base to peak, Kilimanjaro is actually the highest mountain in the world).  I hope to survive 21.1km (half uphill, half downhill) starting at an elevation around 3,500 feet.  We have to finish in the first 1,650 to receive medals and t-shirts so we have a goal.  This video pretty much sums it up.



We fly to Kilimanjaro Airport on Friday night and plan to go on a safari in Arusha National Park on Saturday.  The race begins at 7am Sunday morning (10pm Saturday night, CST) at the stadium in Moshi, home of this  business.

We fly back to Dar on Sunday afternoon.

Wish us luck!

Baby Elephants

A highlight of our time in Nairobi was our visit to The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust. I'd been wanting to go there since last year when Jon, Nena and Suha visited. The trust takes in orphaned elephant babies who would be unable to survive in the wild (elephants subsist exclusively on their mothers' milk until they're two years old), hand rears them in the "elephant nursery," and then gradually reintroduces them into the wild. The nursery is in Nairobi National Park and the public is invited to see the keepers feed the elephants (using elephant-sized baby bottles).


After eating, the elephants drink water,


play,


and cool off in the mud.



The whole experience was just as cool as I'd imagined. I even got to pet this elephant, who was feeling friendly. She was quite bristly feeling, since she was covered with short wiry hairs, and rather muddy.


If you ever find yourself in Nairobi, this is a must-do activity!

Merry Christmas from London

Merry Christmas to everyone!

Lucy and I arrived in London for the holidays early Thursday morning after being snowed out in Nairobi for a few days. We changed from our shorts and flip flops at Heathrow and took the subway into town looking a bit like a traveling circus.

We are staying in a very nice flat in Chelsea that belongs to a friend of Lucy’s family.  Our blood has thinned significantly since leaving Hanover so it feels quite cold to us here and are each wearing multiple layers of long underwear at all times for safety.  The grocery store around the corner has been visited four times and we have stored up butter, cheese, and chocolate for the long winter ahead.

Yesterday afternoon we went to St. Paul’s for a carol service but were unable to get inside it was so full.  They had set up a jumbo screen to broadcast the service in a nearby square so we stood in the cold singing carols with a couple hundred of Lucy’s fellow countrymen.

After the service, we took the tube back to our neighborhood and did only what seemed appropriate when in England on Christmas Eve: stopped in the local pub for a snack and beer.  We had some excellent warm brie with red onion chutney and some sweet potato fries (Lucy: “best I’ve ever had”) to go with my Guinness and her blueberry cider.

This morning Lucy had a stocking for me with dark chocolate covered ginger and an orange in it.  We had tea and french toast for breakfast.  We went to church at St. Luke’s (built in 1825) across the street from the flat.

We have a small tree from Nakumatt in Nairobi with two maasai angel ornaments on it.  We don't have any presents, but we feel quite festive and are certainly happy to be here.

Nairobi Safari Day

This morning we did the Nairobi safari loop of Nairobi National Park, Elephant Orphanage, Giraffe Sanctuary, and Karen Blixen House.  We ran into a male lion on the side of the road while in the park and have some pretty awesome pictures.
 

Queue music from The Lion King: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack.

 Our flight was canceled to London tonight so we are in Nairobi for a few more days...

Rwanda Coffee Now on Sale in the U.S.

The 2010 coffee crop from Rwanda is now on sale and two of the roasters have called out TechnoServe in their marketing efforts.

• Intelligentsia Coffee: Zirikana, Rwanda: Kirezi - Intelligentsia is a high-end coffee roaster that has bought a significant amount of coffee from TechnoServe cooperatives in Rwanda.  The Kirezi cooperative that is highlighted in the coffee's "story" is a new group that received a ~$13K loan to finance a washing station because of the work that I am doing here.

• Peet's Coffee and Tea: Uzuri African Blend - Peet's has been a key buyer of TechnoServe coffee in East Africa for many years and views the Coffee Initiative as a valuable partner in Rwanda and Tanzania.  This year's Uzuri blend has been released and the reviews are pretty solid (check at the bottom of the first link above).  The page above also includes links to a slideshow with another TechnoServe cooperative Abangakarushwa and a video that I've included below.  The employees in the slideshow that do the sorting and drying at coffee wet mills in Rwanda make 500 Rwandan Francs a day (~$0.84), a very good wage in rural areas where cash wages are virtually non-existent.

These types of stories are the best way to explain what the Coffee Initiative is all about...

Happy Thanksgiving to Everyone!

Lucy made delicious pumpkin pies, and we have just returned from a Thanksgiving feast (after work of course).  Lucy is cutting the desserts with some friends below.  We are sorry we cannot be with our friends and family in the U.S but have been thinking of everyone.  Have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

On a related note, I haven't gotten a lot of feedback on a certain issue since being in Tanzania so thought Thanksgiving gatherings might be a good time to survey the crowd.  This issue concerned me during the last election and continues to be in the news quite regularly.

What would you do if Sarah Palin became President?

Let me know what you find out!

Africa & Coffee Articles V

Another installment of things that interest me!

Africa:

• NYTimes: In the Footsteps of the Museum's Gorillas (11/21/10) - Lucy found this interesting article linking the American Museum of Natrual History in New York to the Virunga Mountains in East Africa.  Apparently the scenes in the Hall of African Mammals are depictions of actual places from the 1920s and a curator from the museum is returning to the site where the gorillas scene originated.  Below is a picture from one of our visits to the Virungas last year with the same mountains from the museum behind us.  

• NYTimes: When Donations Go Astray (11/20/10) - Not a new thing but everyone should check how efficient charity organizations are before donating.

• NYTimes: Lost Boys of Sudan Fill in the Blanks of Their Past (11/20/10) - 20 years later resettled Sundanese find a link to their former lives. 

• WSJ: Banks Exit From Embassy Business (11/20/10) - Embassy banking is big business in Africa with so much aid money needing a home until it can be spent (or siphoned off to the government!).  Apparently in the U.S., the banking regulations have gotten so hairy with anti-money laundering rules that major banks are just walking away from embassy business.

• WSJ: Putting Cap on Bad Juju Conjures Up a Good Business (11/19/10) - Welcome to Africa!  You should read this article if you want to begin to understand how challenging it is to get things done here.  Also, the effects of this ride on Lucy's juju are currently unknown (but her driver is ready for the long winter!).

Thanksgiving in Tanzania

Jon and I are going to a Thanksgiving potluck tomorrow evening. Tomorrow is not a school or work holiday for us, so we'll head over for dinner.

This is one of the three pumpkin pies I made to contribute to the party. We don't have a pie pan, so as you can see, I improvised. I used this recipe from King Arthur Flour for the filling and one from smittenkitchen.com (have I mentioned how much I like her recipes??) for the crust.

Because you can't buy canned pumpkin here, I roasted 2 pumpkins in the oven and then scooped out the insides and pureed them in our blender. The blender is a big development for us--last year I had to mash the pumpkin by hand with a potato masher. Then I added spices, cream, milk, eggs, sugar etc. to the pumpkin, poured the filling into the pie crust, baked it, and voila!

Please notice the very appropriate tablecloth. I bought it last weekend at the fabric market downtown. I was quite excited!

I am very thankful for all of my friends and family, both near and far. I'll be thinking of you tomorrow. Happy Thanksgiving!

Ozymandias

Ozymandias

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

In sixth grade, I was lucky enough to have Mrs. Taliaferro as my English teacher. Under her expert guidence, we studied and memorized this Shelley poem. So, when I found myself in Luxor, the Brearley girl in me couldn't pass up the opportunity to visit the statue that (supposedly) inspired the poem. My friend Ruth and I even had a dramatic reading of the poem while overlooking it.

This is taken from the opposite direction as the picture above. Here, you can see what remains of his head and torso.


While there are no "trunkless legs" to be seen, both of his feet remain. This is me standing on the one that you can see in the top picture. Imagine how big the statue once was!

Egypt

I rode a camel by the pyramids of Giza,


visited the "bent" pyramid in Dashur,

saw the world's oldest boat,

sailed the Nile in Luxor (on a somewhat newer boat),

wore a headscarf,

saw too many tombs and temples to count,

and so much more.

Egypt is amazing!

Cinnamon Rolls

Cinnamon rolls (and a Rwandan potholder). What more do you need on a day off from school? For those of you who are interested in making your own cinnamon rolls, I used a recipe from my favorite food blog, smittenkitchen.com. Happy Eid!

Africa & Coffee Articles IV

The latest installment of things relevant to our lives in Africa (sort of):

• WSJ: African Brand Is Sweet on Obama (10/7/10) - Obama is all over Africa ("First Kenyan to be President of the United States").  The possibility of products with Obama are endless here.  Lucy has a lovely apron with Obama's face on it and had to stop me from buying these fashionable britches.

• WSJ: Troops Pledged to Somalia (10/7/10) - Uganda will provide the physical bodies if someone else pays.  Museveni has been President of Uganda for 24 years and was able to remove any mention of term limits from the constitution in 2006.
• WSJ: Catching Africa's Investment Bug Is Proving Contagious (10/6/10) - Yes, limited competition results in healthy margins, but can volatile exchange rates, corruption, political instability, and an unskilled labor force be overcome?  Cellular providers and breweries print money in Africa, but can other industries?
• WSJ: When Togo Played Bahrain, the Whole Match Was a Fake (10/4/10) - Bahrain paid to fly the Togo national team to Bahrain for an exhibition match.  A team came but it wasn't the national team.  This story probably sounds ridiculous to Americans but doesn't seem odd to me after living in Africa. The pictures below were taking soccer games in Kigali.  The national stadium was a ten-minute walk from our house.

• NYTimes: Frenzy of Rape in Congo Revails U.N. Weakness (10/3/10) - The stories that continue to come out of Congo are hard to imagine and quite disturbing.  This article reinforces what seems to status quo when it comes to the U.N. providing peacekeepers.  The video below shows the landscape of the area which is very similar to Rwanda.

2nd Avenue Construction in New York

So I wrote in April about what could have been my apartment in New York at 91st and 2nd Avenue (VolunteerExpat: Upper East Side Rat Infestation) and another article came out yesterday about the effects of the 2nd Avenue subway construction on local businesses (NYTimes: Subway Work on 2nd Avenue Hobbles Stores).  The picture included in the Times (below) actually shows what would have been my apartment (the row of windows on the second right above the word "Cottage").

Who knew I'd be moving soon enough to a dirt road in Rwanda...

Also, my lunch just arrived and it is tasty as always.  Goat, rice, spinach from the woman around the corner on the street.  I have this for lunch about four days a week.

Oh How I Miss Bacon

Bacon is delicious!  When I was a child the smell of bacon cooking at my grandmothers' houses used to get me out of bed.  The last bacon I had before returning to Africa was served at Tim and Christina's wedding in Lake Tahoe where dates were used as a vehicle for bacon consumption.  I can taste them now...

Well these signs are the closest thing I can really get to bacon these days ("Quality Meat Products!" is an untrue statement), and unfortunately they line the street outside our house.  So close...yet so far...

In conclusion, I disagree with this Wall Street Journal article (WSJ: The Bacon Backlash) claiming bacon is so 2009.  Obviously, those people haven't been to Africa recently.

Running with the Hash House Harriers

After Lucy's marathon a few years ago in San Diego (below), we have enjoyed running together a bit more when we get around to it.

One motivation to run is the Hash House Harriers, a running/social group with chapters in 1,251 cities in 183 countries.  We started participating this spring in Kigali and have participated in the Dar es Salaam "hash" every Monday night since we arrived.  There is typically a 35-55 minute run with the group (~50 people) meeting up along the way for "beer stops" and concluding at someone's house for supper and additional socializing.  Over the past few weeks we have made a few friends and Lucy even has two of her parents who regularly participate.

So far the first three weeks have all been on the Msasani Peninsula (where we and many expats live...see map on the right side of the blog of relevant spots in Tanzania), which is quite flat, but hypothetically the runs could take place anywhere someone wanted to plan a trail.  Most of the running has been east-west on dirt roads with connections on north-south paved roads, though it is quite circuitous in reality and would be quite easy to get lost given how every spot looks pretty much the same.  The Dar hash is quite a contrast to Kigali where many of the participants were Rwandan and we were running up and down swampy valleys around mud brick houses and through people's fields and cow pastures.

There are a few major runs each year spread around Tanzania (where fetching t-shirts are given out) and also regional  (some recently returned from one in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) and international hashes (last year people from Rwanda went to Malaysia).  In two weeks is the 1,400 Dar hash so there is a weekend excursion involved where the group will travel to a house on south beach.  We may attend if our schedule permits.

On a related note, a couple of interesting articles on running that Rawson found on NPR:

• NPR: Study - Humans Were Born To Run Barefoot
• NPR: Americans Long Way From Running Barefoot
• NPR: For Humans, Slow And Steady Running Won The Race

Food in Dar Part 1

As many of you know, Jon and I like food. We like to grocery shop, cook, bake and eat, both at home and in restaurants. One of the most difficult things for us to adjust to in Kigali was the lack of restaurants and the lack of western groceries. During our time there, we struggled to purchase things that most Americans view as staples: cereal, skim or low fat milk, tomato sauce, cheese, crackers, granola bars, whole wheat bread etc. We also suffered through mediocre restaurant meals that were expensive, more often than not took 3 hours, and frequently ended with only some of the dishes that we'd ordered actually being delivered to our table.

In some ways, this was great. It forced us to realize how many packaged foods we tend to consume, to eat a lot of local fruits and vegetables, and to strengthen our cooking skills. It also forced Jon to like Indian food, since the two best restaurants in Kigali are Indian. This was a big victory for me, since I've always liked it, and have struggled to get Jon to enjoy it.

Given this background, it has been immediately obvious to us that one of many differences between Kigali and Dar is in the food scene. There are two grocery stores near our house (5-10 min walk), and two more about a 20 minute walk away. Together I think these stores have more Western foods than you can find in all of Kigali. This is partly because there is a much larger expat community here in Dar, so there is greater demand for imported and Western food. It is also partly due to geographical differences. Dar is on the water and is a major port, so things can be brought here fairly easily by boat. Kigali is landlocked and relatively far inland, and so everything is trucked there over land, usually across Kenya and Uganda, which is expensive and risky--the roads are bad and you often see overturned trucks by the side of the road that have been completely cleaned out by people from nearby villages.

In our recent trips to local grocery stores, we have found some exciting items, including delicious Irish butter, a variety of cheeses, and cookies that my mom likes:


We also saw the very same kind of cookies that a boy once memorably gave to Becca before a field hockey game:


And....drumroll please....Shreddies and Parmalat skim milk!


Shreddies are a kind of cereal that is a cross between Shredded Wheat and Chex. It is available in Australia (where I first had it), the UK, and Canada, but not in the US. I really like them, so I was VERY excited to find them at the grocery store near our house. Parmalat is hyper-pasteurized milk that actually tastes like milk (unlike some other brands that are available here and in Rwanda--one brand that I tried tastes like cow, rather than milk) and it comes in skim, 1.5% and whole. I have a soft spot for Parmalat in particular because that is what we drank when I was growing up in Hong Kong. My father is still the proud owner of a set of book ends that I made him as a Christmas present when I was in 1st or 2nd grade that are empty Parmalat boxes filled with sand and covered with marbleized paper.

Although Dar has a lot of exciting groceries that are imported from Europe and the US, it also has many East African staples that we're familiar with from Rwanda, including cassava and sorghum flours, powdered milk, and the every popular Pep-Tang, a tomato-ish sauce that resembles synthetic ketchup, and is often regrettably served with french fries (chips), rice and pasta.


And, last but not least, we have everyone's favorite "Fat Spread":

Pirates Love the Dark 'n' Stormy

I was introduced to the Dark 'n' Stormy a few years ago by Chris and Ben in Castine and was immediately hooked.  The ingredients (ginger beer, black rum, lime, and ice) are quite simple but can be hard to find in sustainable quantities and quality.  Particularly difficult to source are a really spicy ginger beer and a black rum so terrible you can picture the only people drinking it neat are pirates (NYTimes: "as dark as motor oil and with a distinctively charred flavor").  Well, times have changed and the Dark 'n' Stormy is alive and kicking in Tanzania.

As I said the extra spicy ginger beer is the key and Tanzania has a product called Stoney Tangawizi that fits the bill.  Tangawizi is the Swahili word for ginger and the product is made by Coca-Cola in East Africa (though not Rwanda).  It is probably one of those drinks I tried at The World of Coca-Cola tasting room as a child and couldn't imagine someone actually drinking it.  Well, I was wrong.  It is delicious!

There is no Gosling's Black Seal available in the Duty Free of any of the five airports I have been in of late (though my guy at Duty Free in Kigali says he will order some and have it by November) so Bacardi Black was substituted (the Captain Morgan's Black was terrible).  Note: Like with a "Bacardi & Coke" (I learned this in Puerto Rico), Gosling's has trademarked "Dark 'n' Stormy" so if someone orders one in a bar it is required that only Gosling's Black Seal is used (NYTimes: The Right Stuff (by Law)).

Limes/green lemons are readily available in the markets and ice is being made in a very nice refrigerator with ice cube trays in our new apartment.

I imagine I am the only person having the Dark 'n' Stormy in Tanzania, but you should try them at home!  Lime optional, enjoyment mandatory!

• NYTimes: Case Study - Cloudy, With a Chance of Ginger
• Ginger Beer Recipes for home brewers (Morgan)