Odds and Ends from Dar Life

CLICK ON ANY PICTURE TO ENLARGE!

Being from a rural hometown I grew up around folks with green thumbs but have never done much in the garden etc. Knowing we would have a balcony I did a bit of research before coming and bought some seeds of vegetables that supposedly would grow well in a tropic climate. Interestingly they came from a seed company in Mississippi. Laurel had also brought along some herb seeds to make sure she had things like basil that she regularly uses. With great trepidation we embarked on a container garden for our westward facing balcony. It gets a ton of hot, hot sun in the afternoons but it is "what we got" as they say.

We started with seeds planted in the bottoms of old water bottles about 6 weeks ago. My expectations were low. That big bottle in the back is my watering can. Coupled with zip ties and 3M Dual-Lock fasteners we are finding there is not much you cannot do with the water bottles which are made of sturdy plastic. We have used them for waste cans, soap holders (Kudos to Laurel on that one), shower caddies and planters. 

About 6 weeks later we have a serious "mess" of bean plants that are thriving and starting to climb the homemade lattice we constructed out of spare nylon twine. Note the 5 gallon buckets they are in. A shopping spree produced these. A casual question to the building manager about where I could buy potting soil produced about 200# of rich Tanzanian soil delivered in old cement bags. In total the soil cost TSZ 10,000 or $7!

I must give a shout out here to my older brother, Bob, because the beans are not just any beans but are speckled butter beans I have planted in his honor. We are gonna be eating lots of butter beans about Christmas time if all goes well! I cannot wait. 

Food continues to be a pleasant discovery in Dar. The notions of major weight loss while here have fallen victim to the reality of an astounding array of fresh fruits and vegetables that you buy from small sellers with roadside carts. They receive fresh produce from the main market every day and simply resell it to residents of the neighborhood. The same guys are at the same spots daily. Laurel loves to shop at the end of our block and has developed a great rapport with these guys. Mostly they teach her Kiswahili. She is a great cook and is slowly teaching me to do simple dishes. I can now shop veggies etc without cutting my fingers! Here are our first homemade pizzas that were quite tasty.

Many of these small projects being described become possible because I brought a ton of little stuff like a Leatherman (given to me by David Stringfield 20 years ago!), rechargeable batteries, good glue, zip ties, stainless steel wire and other goodies. Although my bags were heavy these items have been invaluable. You can get most anything here but finding where it is being sold can be very difficult as there are no WalMart type stores with vast arrays of merchandise. Most of the places we shop range from 50 square ft to 500 square ft in size. Having to walk everywhere or take an expensive taxi serves to discourage casual shopping. 

It took me a month to find silicone caulk. Most of that delay was because I could not adequately describe what I wanted given my lack of fluency in Kiswahili. Simple things like a hardware store are just not easily found. You have to know to go to this small specific shop for that particular item in most cases. We are learning but have found it challenging. Ultimately I found the caulking at a local 100 square ft shop I was regularly walking by without appreciating it had hardware type items. My taxi driver showed me when I tried to get him to take me several miles to a store I thought might have it. Could be I never saw the hardware store because it was located right next to a funeral pallor in a strip of stores! 

This is a "Stoney" Tangawizi, a ginger based cold drink or soda that is a Tanzanian favorite and has won over everyone in our Dar crew. It is delicious and unique! One of my best discoveries has been finding a place to buy these at the hospital. Muhimbili itself will be the subject of my next posting.

A small sampling of the inordinate amount of electronic cords, connectors and general "I am sure I will need this" items I brought with me in place of clothes, medical books or shoes. I am very glad I was so compulsive as we are able to enjoy Netflix, HBO Go, Hulu Plus and other streaming content from the US displayed on our TV. We have never activated the satellite system left to us by our predecessors so we really do not have TV as such. We brought a large trove of recorded movies and TV series like Breaking Bad or Downton Abbey that we play on laptops or on the dormant TV. 

Internet in Dar comes in two flavors, fast but expensive as you pay by the GB, and slow but all you can eat in terms of GB of downloaded data. We are juggling a mixture of these two. Our main link is a DSL line that is slow by US standards (2 Mbps) but has unlimited data and is paid for by the month. It has been worth every penny it costs. This makes our apartment more like home than virtually anything else.  

The device above is my 4G hotspot which has brisk internet speed and great coverage. Unfortunately you pay for the dat you use in bundles. If you exceed the limit it just stops working unless you recharge it with more money. It is used as a backup and to keep me connected at Muhimbili. I have an office computer which is quite old and functional but there is no reliable internet service at work. I share the one wired ethernet jack with my officemate but find it only works about 25% of the time. There is no internet at the hospital itself that I can access. The hotspot helps me look up things online when I am on the wards and makes my wi-fi iPad a usable computer when at work. It is not cheap and you pay for what you eat so you have to pick and choose what you download. I am grateful to have it nonetheless. Many of our colleagues in GHSP in more rural locales are not so fortunate. 

Our other luxury is a washer located on our side balcony. This is highly valued as we have relatively few clothes necessitating our doing frequent laundry loads. It gets a lot of use.

Tried and true - clotheslines for drying. With the breeze pouring off the Indian Ocean a mile away things dry quickly. This is actually a great balcony off our kitchen because of the super breeze it gets. In the morning the breeze is to the east to the ocean and once the sun comes up it changes back to being to the west. If this had a decent view it would be our main hangout. It is a great place to dry off after the hot walk home. The sun here is brutal after about 7 AM. You can feel your head heating up when you momentarily walk out of the shade (if you can find any) on the way to work. It is impressive - you feel like you are under a broiler. As we edge toward hotter weather and the rainy season the only respite will come from going in earlier and earlier in the morning. By2 in the afternoon the 1.5 mile walk home becomes taxing. I am always drenched by arrival at either the hospital or home.

We do not go out much at night because of security and expense. Having to take  cab to and fro is expensive as we are generally discouraged fro walking around after dark except in our immediate neighborhood which is residential. We have found a nice place in our neighborhood called Alliance Française that has a language classes, cultural events and periodic music performances as well as a decent restaurant. We can walk there and back even after dark. 

Last week our fellow Dar volunteers joined us for dinner in our neighborhood followed by a concert at  Alliance Française. These guys are the Black Warriors and are famous Tanzanian musicians. The performance was spirited and enjoyable. It was kind of like seeing a comeback performance of a great rock group. All the leads were in their 60's and now had younger musicians backing them. They still had it going on though. See the video below.

Nice moves!

Today we went to the famous Mwenge woodcarvers market north of town today with our fellow Dar volunteers and shopped for Makonde carvings. They are probably the best known art work produced in Tanzania. This art is produced by the Makonde people of southern Tanzania, and their material of choice is African blackwood, or mpingo. We bought a small "tree of Life" which classically depicts the ancestor and multiple descendants all carved from the same piece of wood.  

This is about 16 inches high. The wood is very dense and naturally a dull brown when sanded. They finish it with black shoe polish t give it the sheen and shine tourists want.

detail view

detail view

Later we had a nice lunch at one of the Mzungu restaurants near by.

From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mzungu Mzungu (pronounced [m̩ˈzuŋɡu]) is a Bantu language term used in the African Great Lakes region to refer to people of European descent. It is a commonly used expression among Bantu peoples in Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda and Zambia. Literally translated it meant "someone who roams around aimlessly" or "aimless wanderer. The term is now used to refer to "someone with white skin" or "white skin".

This post is running quite long so I will throw in a few spectacular balcony sunsets again.

We never tire of these in part because they are followed by one of the most spectacular things I have ever seen, the nightly migration of about 5M African fruit bats. Recently we have noted that the bats have migrated in a much more easterly flight path. Over the past month they have been coming closer and closer to our balcony every night. I cannot describe what a fabulous spectacle this is, particularly with the setting sun in the background.

One of my frustrations has been my inability to capture this with my iPhone or my point and shoot camera. We recently asked our friend, Geoffrey, the guy who took so many fabulous pictures on our safari to come, and capture this recent change of flight path. It begins nightly with the departure of these large blue birds from the stand of palms about 300 yards from our balcony. Invariably, about 10 minutes later the bats and mosquitos start arriving from the north (to our right).

Geoffrey found the challenge daunting...capture close ups of bats flying by quickly in the dying light of day. He shot hundreds of frames with his high end equipment. The most arresting photos are these shillouete images of the bats through his telephoto lens.

Can you say Batman?

The frame that follows in one of my favorites.

Thanks to Geoffrey you have some idea of what we are now experiencing daily. They are actually flying over our heads when we are standing on our bedroom balcony which juts out from the building. It is fascinating to watch.

This is very inadequate movie of what we now experience nightly. These bats are often 30-50 feet in front of us when we stand on our balcony. Two months ago they were so far away we could only see them as distant dots. Now they dodge our building as they fly south and we can see their fur. We have no idea why they now come so close but are loving the spectacle.

Lastly I give you some slow motion captured with my iPhone. The quality is marginal but I hope you well appreciate the effect. Sorry to go on and on about the bats but words are not enough nor are the images I can offer you.