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.