The Final Edition of the Pangani Daily Times

Hey Everyone,

Thanks for all the feedback on this blog/emails etc. We appreciate them :) comments are good too!

Anyways the mood has brightened since our last post and nothing major has gone wrong since! The ferry that was "broken" down on Zanzibar was of course not broken down so with some judicious payment methods we made it to dar es salaam as planned. We stayed at the dar YWCA which was okay and did nothing much of note for 3 days. Dar is nicer than we first realised and has the odd western aspect to it - meaning of course that it has pizza which is great for recovering from gastro...

One incident of amusement that will be exaggerated for years to come was my exchange with a pickpocket. A big scary one too(i.e maybe 50 kilos of scrawny local man). The story is that we were walking past the bus stand and some nice chap aggressively yanks on my shirt and accuses me of standing on his foot. Kate and I begin apologising like mad. All of a sudden I feel a slimy hand dart into my pocket and go for my wallet. With astounding speed i clamp my left hand onto his and shove/perform some crazy ninja move with my right hand. The lout falls down and the people around yell at him. We scurry away before there is any violence etc etc. Wallet saved!!

So after Dar we head to Arusha in the north. This is the town/city where all the westerners visit to go safari/climb kili etc. We were picturing maybe a Queenstown type adventure destination. While I won't deride Arusha it wasn't quite to this level. We saw the UNICTR - tribunal for rwanda which is obviously important. You can tell this in Africa by the quality of the 4WD's they have. This tribunal had white Merc's...

The purpose of this visit to Arusha was to meet with our charity to determine the future of our time here in Tanzania. Kate has been having troubles with her medical registration and despite having done everything we were meant to do we now know it'll take 3+ months, money and effort to fix. I have also been having troubles with my business volunteering in terms of the amount of work actually needed (very little) and the ethically "sub-rigorous" way in which they operate. We took this information to our charity and after some debate agreed that it would be best if we all shook hands and went our separate ways. This is a disappointing blow for our humanitarian intentions here in Tanzania but too bad.

We are now trying to decide how to spend the rest of our time and efforts here in Africa. We are currently planning a bit of travel and then we'll reassess. This travel plan is rather fluid and may involve heading to Malawi, Botswana, Vic Falls and down through Namibia to Capetown. The first step was to head home to good old Pangani and catch up with our friends. We are now doing washing like crazy (except that someone stole our pegs from our washing line) and eating our last Pangani Orange's (best in Tanzania) We'll shortly pack up our gear - except for the Wesley Snipes DVD which we have donated to the local library to file under the section "Quality American Literature," and head to Dar es Salaam again. From there we'll make a proper plan and hopefully execute it like the hard outs we are. After all, we still have zip-off pants and thus must travel!

Kate has taken over!! The blog is falling...

Just wondering if anyone knows of any companies who have money for charity lying around and would like to support an HIV based charity. TAWAHAESS (The team for assisting in the war against HIV AIDS and elimination of social stigma in Pangani) have just lost their German benefactor. They provide home based care, food and nutrition to very poor people with HIV, assist with transport to the hospital for people in the villages to get their antiretrovirals and give counseling to anyone who wants an HIV test. They also do a fair bit of community education. Their running costs are about $500 usd per month. I don't really know where to start looking but if anyone has any ideas that would be great. Unfortunately it costs $$ to set up a website so they don't have one to look at (nor do they have a computer). Cheers.

Righto, take care everyone down under. Talk again soon!

Zanzibar - " Nemesis Island"

Well I guess you have to laugh about it. This post is kind of like one of those stories you write when you are seven years old at primary school using the black crayon - "the worst week was when..."


We are having a few issues with our volunteering placement at the moment. To fix it (in Jeff and Kate style) we figured a nice trip to the alluring azure island of Zanzibar would work a treat.

Zanzibar held an aura of hope, of nice food, tourists to yarn to and an ease of life we desparately sort.

We departed Pangani last thursday at 5am on a motorized dhow. Yup. This sucker was made from mangrove and powered by an almighty 9.9 hp motor. Kate, myself, the boat captain, our rastafarian tour guide and 4 other unnecessary randoms transported across the open ocean on this thing. Anyways, despite the apparent hairiness of this mode of transport it worked fine. The guys even caught a 1 metre long fish of some description (yellow? with fins?) using no rod. Impressive.

So we land on the beach (well in the ocean next to the beach) and promptly get hit up by a cop. He was a real cop we have been assured (despite his casual clothes and photocopied badge/extortion permit). Anyways he wants us to get an immigration stamp. We refuse as we aren't immigrating and he packs a sad. Our rasta tour guide has a friend on the island who comes to help. His form of help was to take money from us and give it to the cop. This of course worked very well. It was of course annoying to see this cop and this "friend' sharing out the money 30 mins later. Crappy incident #1.

So anyways, we stay the night at premier beach resort the Kendwa Rocks. This was fine. We picked out our room and our rasta tour guide Ali decided to stay there too. Next thing I know we're standing at reception paying for our room and it becomes clear we have to pay for Ali's
room too!?! Apparently when he said he'd take us to Zanzibar he meant "I'll sit on the boat with you in return for a nights accomodation, food and money for me to get home!." So that night picture us sitting at our candle light table on the sand in a very romantic honeymoon style setting - just me, Kate and our Tanzanian Rasta tourguide. Funniest part about Ali is that he actually had never really been to Zanzibar before and thus had no idea of anything much at all. Just another hilarious situation we'd manage to find ourselves in. Thus I dub this crappy incident #2.

The next morning I wake around 4am feeling hot. I rewake at 7am and i'm feverish and feel terrible. We promptly bail from our beach resort and hire a taxi to boost the 55 km into Stonetown in south Zanzibar where a hospital and western ammenities beckon. Kate at this point secured us a minor victory in the battle against Zanzibar. She scored us a taxi for 20000TSH instead of 50000TSH. This was a grand saving except I think it meant that the driver decided to skip the procurement phase of our drive and thus we conked out of petrol half way up the first hill 500m from our origin. So we sat there for an hour. They feigned mechanical problems and took out the battery etc until reinforcements arrived. Crappy incident #3.

Anyways, we get to Stonetown a couple of hours late and promptly check into the Baghani Guest house. This place was nice and great relief for me. It had a tv, a western bog and an alright bed. It was here I spent 3 full days lolling around sleeping, sweating, feeling rotten etc etc. My efforts at going out were fascical and brief. Luckily though I tested negative for Malaria and merely had a mean bout of gastro. Kate during this time didn't really get much touristing done and generally had a bad time too. We dub this crappy incident #4.

Anyways when we go to leave the Baghani on day four we realise our small camera is missing. Cliche! Turns out that someone has clearly taken it during one of my brief sojourns out of the hotel. The safe in our room was broken so we'd been hiding our valuables etc etc and plus this place was actually nice so we weren't too worried about our gear. Management accused us of going touristing and losing it somewhere knowing full well we'd barely left the place in days. So you'll have to wait even longer for photos now. Crappy incident #5.

So anyways, after I began to recover we planned to do some tourist stuff. Some tour guide called Rasheed organised a tour for us. It was 70 000 TSH and sounded great - we had a private car to take us around and show us the industry etc. So we jump in the car which drives for 2 mins before stopping. Rasheed has to visit his aunty. After this brief delay we drive 10 mins to a plantation. We did have a good time there looking round all the sorts of trees and plants for tumeric, cardamom, vanilla, chilli, coffee, etc etc. This was nice. After about an hour though our tour finishes and the tour guide wants paid. Yup. So we have to fork out 10 000 TSH ($10 bucks) to pay for our tour. Rasheed then drives us to a "popular" beach for a swim. Kate had her togs and everything. Well after wading through sewerage to get to the ocean we see it's got all these sharp underwater rocks and swimming would be a tad unwise. We storm back to the car. Rasheed tells us that is the end of the tour. Rasheed senses our annoyance but can't work it out. We eventually tell him and so he refunds our 10 000 TSH from teh spice tour. We then have a blubbering apologetic Rasheed trying to appease us for nearly an hour. There is an encore but you've had enough of this one. Crappy incident #6.

So today we are leaving. We got up nice and early, got set for our 10am ferry but it turns out there is none. Dunno why. The 12:30 is broken and so we are now catching the 4pm. Thus I have time to share with the whole world our delightful Zanzibari experience. I am sure this island is alluring and exotic and delightful for most but it is certainly our nemesis island and one we will not be returning to for love or money...

The only real highlight for me was watching McCullum's 158* live on some random Indian cable channel. These things happen though. At 4pm we're off to Dar and then tomorrow on the 10 hour bus to Arusha. Onwards and Upwards.

Hmm. 3 more hours to kill. I wonder if Rasheed has something for us to do? or maybe Ali? or some other nice tour guide?...

Damn I'm looking forward to using our new toaster.

Pangani Daily Times Edition Two

Hey Everyone.

It's a lovely day today. It hasn't rained in 48 hours and the dirt roads are starting to dry out. The ocean breeze keeps the temperature at 30 which is nice.

We went up the river the other night to check it out. It's a magnificent place and we visited villages that haven';t seen white people in months. Classic african colonialist adventures. It was fun though and the village elders were all amusingly bug eyed on palm wine - palm tree sap fermented into some unearthly brew. We also saw a colobus monkey to go along with the wee vervet's we saw the other day.

Then sunday we spent the day making dinner. An adventure in itself! We went to the market and acquired tomatoes (50 cents for 6), lentils (50 cents for half a kilo from a sack), garlic, whatever else total cost = $1.50. We cooked on a wee kerosene stove for ages which was great but then i noticed small bugs crawling across the top of our pot. Turns out the curry powder we had bought was infested. This was massively annoying as it wsa the only "western" ingredient in our dish - i.e it came in a plastic masterfoods style shaker. Oh well. Luckily the bugs were black and we could see them in our yellow dahl. Kate spent 20 minutes picking them all out!! dinner was eventually tasty though. All's well that end's well.

Our bed is our newest problem. It's a slat bed with an inch of foam on top. The local shop will sell me a much better mattress if i give them $70 USD which is a massive ripoff. Humpf. Also, all the local beds are six feet long which is fine for kate but about 2 inches too short for me and when you have a mosquito net you can't touch the sides etc. Bsaically i have to sleep in a ball on our inch thick foam mattress! ah well. it's all good.

Another funny thing that's happened is that kate decided she needed more to do at nights so randomly she bought a 16 in 1 dvd off some street vendor. Anyways, the dvd of course doesn't go at all and the street vendor has moved to timbuktu or somewhere so a refund looks unlikely. THe funniest part though is that the dvd is a wesley snipes collection. It has blade one, blade two, passenger 57 and other essentials on it! Kate must really be battling to have bought that one!!

O well - enough frmo me. take care.

Jeff

Pangani Daily Times Edition One

Hey Hey from Pangani's intrnet cafe. This cafe is truly awesome complete with latte's, almond biscotte and a snotty metrosexual waiter!! (or so i wish)

Anyways, we've settled into life here in Pangani in a big way. We become a little more civilized with each day that passes and manage to find wee tidbits of western culture to cling to! For instance yesterday we managed to upgrade from silk sleeping sacks to a fitted sheet. Kate even made a fruit salad for breakfast (pear and banana chopped with pocket knife!)

We spent the weekend at a nice wee resort called Peponi's which has banda's, fans and chocolate brownies. You can only guess at the gluttonous uptake. They also had vervet monkeys which climbed on the neighbouring banda. pretty cool. From Peponi we headed up to Tanga for a day or so. We stayed at the gracious Malindi hotel which had A/C (not functioning) a shower (not functioning) and a bed with 4 broken slats (obviously functioned too well for some previous guests/kids who still live at home). We visited 4-5 aid recipients while in Tanga and we're suprised at how well they are doing and how easily they seem to be increasing the size of their small enterprises.

In the course of heading out to one place I experienced a daladala which blew the 19 people and a goat daladala out the window. This one had 31 people in it. Admittedly many of these were children but hey 31 is still impressive! no goats though. Thanks also to Bela for entertaining us/joining us on this skirmish.

So yeah, since then it's been more of Pangani life. We've had another 3 bean stews and another couple of doses of tanzanian bureucracy. In particular, young Kate has been sidelined by a surly chap at the hospital who insists that she have a certain type of registration. So while she waits she's decided to try her hand at teaching. Kate is now officially known as "Mrs Kate" the form 3 english teacher and form 2 biology teacher. This means she is teaching 15-20 year olds about the birds and the bees, and reading comprehension too. It might seem like a bit of a shambles but considering that the kids sit there with no teacher at the moment then Kate will be a massive improvement. That's right - they literally just sit and wait til a teacher is found from somewhere. Anyways, while Kate is teaching those subjects I will be teaching maths. This seemed like a great idea until i saw the syllabus and realised they had to learn matrices! i.e the matrices which were removed from the NZ school system some time before I started! so my weekend will be spent learning maths and Kate's will be spent learning the various parts of the ecosystem.

Photos - i would love to upload photos but the computers here aren't up to it .the first problem is that they have no resizing software. If someone out there could email me a small photo resizing program (<1mb) that would be super.

I think we'll spend the rest of the afternoon hanging out with some locals and maybe get to the beach for a swim if the rain holds off. Tomorrow we are heading up the Pangani river to drink coconut wine and check out the sunset. Hopefully it's awesome.

Time for a chungwa. party on.

Jeff (and Kate who is "helping" me today!!)

PS 50 cent is playing in dar es salaam on May 5th! shall we go? he's no Professor Jay (most famous tanzanian rapper by far) but it would be hilarious.

Africa!!!

Hey Everyone.

Africa!!! We've been here maybe 10 days now and settling in so very rapidly! I could write screeds on our experiences thus far - most good, some bad...

Let's ignore the flights, the taxis and dubai airport and skip to Dar es Salaam. It felt wierd to be landing there (esp. after dubai) where the trees were the tallest things and the international terminal was smaller than a supermarket. After an hour of sweaty customs forms we were met by a random who drove us through the streets to the man who was looking after us. Mr Mgoba was delightful and certainly helped us cope with our first tastes of Africa. He made it seem such an easy place and had us on a bus with ease.

We snaked north out of Dar on this reasonably crusty bus but were amazed by the greenery and the mud huts everywhere. It was an awesome feeling. Anyways, about 10 mins later i feel tiny hands running through my hair. I turn around to find a couple of 4 year old lads very fascinated. They even called out "simba simba" a couple of times...

Later that day (after surviving the horrid tanga bus station) we made it to Pangani. We were hoisted off the bus in the dark (no street lights) and pointed towards a house. Admittedly at this point we were v. tired and I was totally unable to see myself or kate surviving here.

Anyways, we are now 10 days into our time and things have changed. We've learnt to cope to some degree and are now having real fun.

For instance, we are doing rather well at learning Swahili. I can follow quite a few conversations suprisingly and count etc etc. Makes life easier.

The weather was initially hot (30 degrees day and night) but it's been more like 25 degrees since then. It varies between comfortable and uncomfortable but hey! it's meant to warm up soon after the rains (which pour for a couple of hours each day)

One problem we're having though is food. Pangani is very poor - most people earn approx 1000tsh a day (or $1nzd - don't laugh!) and so you can imagine what sort of things they eat. This lack of variety is tough to deal with. A typical day is a chapati for breakfast with a cup of tea. A couple of scrabble tile sized bits of beef for lunch with some cassava (root vege like spuds) and then maybe beans and rice for tea. We also drink heaps of soda. This fibre free, high fat diet is possibly not ideal but hey we'll make it through!

Volunteering has been admiteddly quite stalled as well thus far. My work is extremely slow due to difficult travel conditions, non-attendance of meetings and the nature of tanzanian business. Kate's is much slower still as she only starts next week! Still, we hope this aspect of our trip improves greatly over the next few months...

The best story we have is of the tournament we held here last week. We were discussing holding it towards the end of our stay but decided to have it early before Mary (the other volunteer here) left. This was just brilliant. They played soccer and netball. The netball was kates domain. Picture her blowing her whistle like crazy trying to control 2 teams and 300 African school girls who don't want a bar of it. Everytime there was goal there was a pitch invasion and absolute mayhem. Brilliant. The first 2 matches went quite well to be honest. There were rules and a general sense of calm prevailed. Then in the final the tension and excitement simply got too much and amusingly enough the two teams broke out in fist fights. Kate dealt to that by simply calling off the entire affair and declaring the match a draw (as you do) This lead to the local girls forming a victory parade around the school grounds for a good 30 mins. The soccer was possibly even more frenetic. The games were played on the quintessial african pitch complete with goats, cows and bicyclists everywhere. The final was a draw. We thus decided to have a penalty shootout. I found myself in the middle of a circle of African kids aged 5-17 blowing the whistle and hoping nothing would happen. THe shootout ended 2-2 and after much haranged consultation with the other Mzungu we called it a draw as well! you had to be there (or see the photos)

Then this morning we abandoned Pangani to get some western style luxury/recovery time.
We jumped onto a daladala (clapped out old minivan) with 19 other people and a goat and and headed to Peponi's - an idealesque (is that a word?) beach resort. They have toasted cheese sammies and steak. So very happy! we even got to see our wedding photos for the first time. They are superb.

Anyways. Hi to everyone and thanks for the texts and emails. We do have a cellphone here but can't think of the number - will post it soon!

Oh, finally, saw a dude walking down the street last night with a fridge on his head. I'm not even making that up.

Take care of yourselves and i'll take care of the steak i am having in an hour or so.

Jeff