SFS Olympics and Arusha!

After one last bittersweet day in Ayalaliyo conducting the last of our interviews, we’ve spent this past week sitting in camp analyzing all of the data we’ve collected. Yes, it’s a bit tedious, but something else that is super awesome has been going on as well. We’re holding the SFS Olympics!! Each DR group competes against the other groups, and each day there are several different competitions. My DR group is Tanzania, as our advisor is Tanzanian, the Wildlife Ecology group is Kenya since their advisor is Kenyan, and the Wildlife Management group is Germany since their advisor is German. So far we’ve competed in Speed Art, Volleyball, Soccer, Arm Wrestling, Slack-Lining, Javelin, and Shot Put. Whenever we have the events, everyone around camp shows up to watch or play. It’s been a super great stress reliever and community experience, especially since we’ve all been split up into groups for the past few weeks. We’ve also been teaching the staff some new games and they’ve been teaching us some new skills, like spear/javelin throwing. Tomorrow is capture the flag!

Another fun thing that I’ve been doing is getting neno la lao (a word of the day) from Michael and Aziz. I reeeaaaallllyyyyy want to be able to converse in Swahili (I can kind of get by, but only kind of. Actually, I can understand some things, but I usually can’t reply), and during DR field work, Michael and Aziz thought it was entertaining to give me Swahili words of the day to learn. I thought it was entertaining, too, so now I bug them each day to give me a new word. The entertaining part is that the words have been things like entrepreneur, empowerment, implementation, cohesion, infrastructure—definitely not your basic Swahili conversation words, but if I ever need to have a political debate or something with someone in Swahili I’ll be set.

And now, for probably the coolest thing that’s happened this week: we were given the opportunity to explore Arusha, one of the largest cities in Tanzania, for our non-program day! It was a great experience, but I am so glad SFS is based in a rural village. We started out the day pretty early, as Arusha is about 2 hours away from Rhotia. We also stopped at a Snake Part just outside of Arusha. This ended up being a lot cooler than we expected. They had most of the snakes found in Tanzania, so it was interesting to see them and learn about them. They also had a small animal sanctuary with a few birds, crocodiles, and this poor Yellow Baboon who was all alone. That was heartbreaking; baboons are extremely social creatures, and I have no idea why they were keeping her alone. She kept reaching out of her cage to hold our hands or groom our arms. Apparently she was rescued from poachers, but I think it would have been much nicer to send her to another place that had other yellow baboons. I guess maybe this would be really hard since baboons are very wary of outsiders… but still, it was so sad to see her alone. They also had camels, which was very random. We also got to ride the camels, which was even more random. There was one baby camel though, who was super lovable. He’d come up to you and try to snuggle and give you kisses. He was best friends with this one Maasai guy, and they would chase each other around the area where the camels were being kept.

After spending more time than we expected at the Snake Park, we headed into the heart of Arusha. 

We were dropped off in what our intern, Becky, likes to call Mzungu Land. This is basically an oasis of relative peace from people staring at you and yelling wazungu and trying to shove paintings in your face to get you to buy them. There are also western-esque shops. There’s a super market/department store that’s comparable to a smaller grocery store back home (but HUGE for here), a coffee shop, a Mexican restaurant, a bookstore, a gelato place, and more. I really wanted to go to an Indian restaurant that had been recommended by our student affairs manager, Mike, so I left Mzungu Land and ventured out into Arusha with a group of friends. With the help of Mike and Becky, we made it to the restaurant and proceeded to have an amazing meal! I had a paneer butter masala, but tried a little bit of everyone’s dish as well. Afterwards, we explored a fruit market, but left pretty quickly because it looked like the fruit markets we were used to in Mto wa Mbu and Karatu, and people were ruder in this one. 

Anyways, after successfully navigating our way back to Mzungu Land on our own, I looked around the super market for a bit, then got gelato (it was amazing), and then coffee! It was nice to have mzungu food, but it probably would have been nicer if the trip had been in the middle of the semester instead of towards the end. At this point, I can pretty much see the days when I can eat cheese on a regular basis again, so I didn’t feel the need to buy some from the store.  

A day in Arusha was the perfect amount of time for me. Driving through Mto wa Mbu on the way back was a huge relief, just because it was so much more calm than Arusha. That was kind of ironic since Mto wa Mbu used to be super overwhelming to navigate at the beginning of the semester. It was also interesting to drive from Arusha to Rhotia now and compare it with the first day we were in Tanzania and did the same drive. The sights have so much more meaning and beauty now that I’m familiar with them. I know I am going to miss the drive from Mto wa Mbu to Rhotia so much. Traveling up the escarpment and being able to look down over the Great Rift Valley at the green island of Lake Manyara National Part, the sky-reflecting Lake Manyara, and cloud shadow-strewn plains is always incredible. It’s a sight I want to remember for the rest of my life.

After this wonderful day of exploring new places, it’s back to data analysis and writing the drafts of our papers. I am a little disappointed that the end of our program ends with us sitting in camp on our computers for most of the day, but the experiences I’ve had up to this point are much more incredible than I ever imagined before coming to Tanzania. We also have the SFS Olympics to help us celebrate our last few weeks here!