Tanzgiving

Coffee trees are in bloom in the yard, Arusha Christmas fair is here and it’s getting hot….must be time for American Thanksgiving.

The coffee trees are absolutely beautiful right now.  I can do with out all the June bugs (they call them Christmas bugs or caramel bugs here), but I’ll take the beautiful green grass and flowering coffee trees. 

  Since Thanksgiving was really just a regular day in Tanzania and the kids had school we all decided to celebrate on Saturday instead. The kids and I started the day at the Arusha Christmas fair (Matt went for a long mountain bike ride). For the Rochester folks, it’s the Tanzanian equivalent of the Park Ave fest…crafts, food, music, etc.  I must admit to being slightly disappointed.  I was hoping to see some very unique and different crafts here, but it was mostly the things we can already get.  That didn’t deter me from spending money though.  I did get some fun Christmas ornaments, bags made by a women’s group and a ceramic pitcher. The kids also had a great time at the ISM tent where they could get their faces painted and jump in the jump castles, etc.

  After a little rest we went to our good friends’, The Foley’s, house for swimming and traditional dinner.  I got off easy and only had to make the mashed potatoes.  It was a full feast:  turkey, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, stuffing, pie and wine…oh, and Sangria.  Yeah to Charles’ Spanish heritage for that nice treat!  I love that we could swim before dinner – not something we get to do in Colorado before Thanksgiving dinner.  Matt definitely earned his meal with a 4 hour mountain bike ride that morning and then swimming with the kids. 

They have a beautiful house with gorgeous views of Mt Meru and sometimes even Kilimanjaro.  The rain threatened, but instead we were just treated with nice views and a rainbow.

We joined the Banks’ family tradition and each added a leaf to the Thanksgiving Tree noting what we were thankful for this year.  

It was interesting that both girls wrote that they were thankful to God this year.

 

 

 

 

 

A lovely evening with great friends and great food.  Thanks to Lara and Charles for hosting all of us orphans this year.

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Unrelated to Thanksgiving, the kids decided that they wanted to dress up like ‘movie stars’ (a la Fancy Nancy) to go out to dinner on Friday night.  Here is the outfit that Anderson came up with.  Matt used his best persuasion skills to remind Anderson that this outfit might not be the best choice for going down the slide and swinging on the swings.  Anderson did eventually agree to change into more appropriate playground attire.  (I still think he looks cute though)

Hopefully our power saga will come to an end this week.  We’ve been having daily power outages (Saturday’s lasted 30 hours) without any back-up.  Our batteries were sent to Dar Es Salaam for replacement over 3 weeks ago with the promise that they’d be back in about 4 days.  Matt stalked the delivery company yesterday hoping that they’d show up before he had to leave again this morning to no avail.  The good news is that 3 of the 4 batteries arrived this morning.  I am cautiously optimistic that the remaining battery shows up and we can again have lights at night and not have the water run out anytime the power is out for more than a few hours.  We’ve been enjoying the evening bath by candlelight, but it does start to get annoying when we can no longer use the toilets..I think it’s the first time in my life I’ve seriously wished for a pit toilet out back. 

I know Thanksgiving is now over and the holiday rush is on.  We are missing you all very much right and send our love to all of you, but especially to those that are really needing it right now.  We love you.  

P1/2 Field Trip after the rains

 

What could be more fun than taking 32 kindergarten and first graders on a field trip?  Doing it during a rainstorm, of course.  Really it had been pouring since 10 pm the night before and after 6 + months of no rain that really made a mess of the roads.  The classes are learning about different types of houses, so the goal was to go visit some different ones (including an orphanage) and compare them to the places that we live.  It really was a great plan.

 

 

Still need to watch out for the local maasai who need to take their cows out, rain or shine.

Oops!  Then I had to go get stuck in the mud.  I even had it in four wheel drive.  This pic isn’t actually of me getting stuck, but this is where we realized that we had a punctured tire.  Perfect spot to try and change that front tire, don’t ya think? 

Baba Eyal was a savior and not only drove the car out from where it was stuck, but was also the main one to help me change the tire.  He was still relatively clean at this point.   

We never did make it to the orphanage.The good news is that it did stop raining and the kids still had a great time.

Chelsea reminding the kids to ‘make good choices’ about where to walk (i.e. not walking through every available mud puddle) 

“How is this house the same as/different than yours?”  

“How is this bathroom different than the one that you use?”

Time for snack at a friend of Ms. Diana’s  

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And, Matt, this is for you.  This is what happens to your son when he is left with only strong female influences.

Wildlife close to home (really just creepy, crawlies)

So, I think that several people believe that the lions, elephants, and zebras are quite literally in our in our backyard.  That’s not quite true (although our good friends do actually have zebras in their backyard).  The wildlife we have around the house is noticeably less…ummmmm…big.  We do get some pretty cool things though (and by cool I mean cool to have outside and not necessarily things that I want in the house).

One of the first really cool things that we had in the yard was a zorilla. 

And then the chameleon Matt found, 

All the little random other lizards (T did actually catch this one in the house)

And then there are the fruit bats (technically not in our backyard, but it was at school, so I’m counting it)

And who can forget the tarantula that was scurrying into the living room before we knocked it back outside

We also have some very interesting moths (maybe not as cool as watching the life cycle of a butterfly),

Very large slugs (that really gross me out),

Giant (completely harmless) rhinoceros beetles,

and this morning we found a cute little hedgehog.

 

We also have mice (that the dogs like to catch and leave dead for us in the yard – although too late to have stopped one from making a nest in the air conditioner vents in the car and another from chewing a hole in our hammock), stick bugs, praying mantis, not to mention our dozen+ chickens and our dogs.

Happy Birthday, Grandpa Chuck

And since Anderson refused to be in the above video, here’s a bonus video of him (and for all to see his new military haircut that his dad gave him…camo pants were purely a coincidence for yesterday’s haircut day)

Happy Birthday, Dad!

A Typical Day

I realize it’s been a while since I’ve posted - did you miss me? I had a great trip to Colorado and got to spend some quality time with friends and family that I have missed so much. It was also great to be in the office and touch base with the great people that I work with. But, after 3 weeks of traveling, it was nice to come home and settle back into our normal routine. Here are a few pics of what a typical day could look like for me (all pics taken over the course of the week):

Anderson went out and got two eggs from the chickens. One from our baby chicks that have just started laying and one from one of the mommas

Drive to the club for the morning workout and I often see women walking with their wood bundles on their heads.

Family on a motorcycle (see baby head in red winter hat…yeah, it’s about 80 degrees now)

Daladala’s (‘buses’) are everywhere. And are either very pop culture-ish or very religious.

Typical lunches for me: Cabbage with beef, salad and ugali

Salad, cabbage and chapati (flatbread that I can most compare to naan)

Playgroup for Anderson on Wednesdays where he gets to play with his “girlfriend” Wilma Rosa - who moves back to Switzerland in Dec :(

And sometimes you just get so tired you need to lay down under the coffee table.

Wedding parade going through town. They all load into the back of a pick-up with the band and play music and honk horns all through Arusha.

Our road/drive-way (the ~1 mile stretch to our house): it’s getting dusty…very dusty (see Kiyah's or Rebecca's blog for more details on that). We can hear the thunder and see the storms over Mt. Meru, but they have yet to reach us.

Another typical obstacle on our road is cows and goats (you can’t see the 6 or so goats that are directly in front of the bumper). The ones you can see had already moved over to the side with Matt wildly honking the horn.

But then there’s home with great views of (now snow dusted) Mt. Meru.

We are the house on the left and David and Joey are on the right.

And (not so typical) fun adventures for Halloween and the fireworks that we went to this week:

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FYI - I added a link on the upper right of the blog page under ‘Other Fun Things’ to Ashlyn’s P1 class blog that her teacher, Chelsea, is great to publish for us all to follow their happenings: http://chekechea1k.blogspot.com/

And just to embarrass Matt…here’s a link to something posted on the TNC website for all to see: http://www.nature.org/wherewework/africa/people/art32644.html

(Really, I’m just super proud of him and it’s just a bonus that it will embarrass him)