PRA and Community Service

I finished my first paper assignment here in Tanzania! For some reason, the relief of finishing has been substantial, despite the fact that it wasn’t that bad. We had to research anything we’d observed on our first trip to Lake Manyara National Park that we were interested in and then write a research paper on how our observations fit into the current literature. I wrote about warthog grouping size, which is actually really fascinating. Sometimes females group up when offspring are present and sometimes they don’t, and no one has really found solid evidence for why. Anyways, it feels good to have the first big assignment done. Now I have another research paper to write on activity patterns in Olive Baboons due on Thursday.

The past week has been a whirlwind of classes! We’ve done birding and grass identification in Ecology. The grass identification was particularly fun. We went back to the grassland right outside of Lake Manyara National Park, where many Maasai graze their herds. Some of them walked with us again, though this time they couldn’t really help us identify much since we were using scientific names. I really love being with the Maasai. I think their language is beautiful, and I learned a couple of words from the guy who walked with us. There’s engeteng (cow), engine and engere (one’s sheep and one is goat), engweli (Thompson Gazelle), enkati (buffalo), and engweleti (shell). The way the words are said is hard to describe, but it is so beautiful. They don’t speak any English or much Swahili, so find ways to communicate is always fun.

We’ve also experienced the first of the rainy season. It’s poured really, really hard for a few hours a couple of days this week. We’ve also had a few intense thunderstorms during the night. The power’s been off and on, which wasn’t helpful when we had to be looking for online articles for our paper. There’s a generator for when the power goes out, but it usually takes a while for it to kick in.

In my last entry, I said I was going to write about the PRA practice project we did in Policy. There's this technique for involving local communities in conserving their resources called the PRA (participatory rural assessment) where you do interviews with local people to learn about the land and its resources, the problems, the history, and the organizations within the community. The whole group was split up into groups of four and given a task from the PRA. I interviewed local people about what they thought the top five problems facing their community are, and then about the organizations working on these issues and if they are effective or if they work together or not. It was a learning experience. We visited all sorts of people with our super cool local guide/translator. The first woman was very poor. She was cooking in her cook house, which was essentially a hut you couldn't even stand up in with mud and stick walls, a thatched roof, and one window maybe six inches by six inches. She was cooking ugali (corn flour and water) over a wood fire. Halfway through the interview she had to run out to give her water barrels to her neighbor, who was driving his tractor the 5km to the closest well so she could get her water for the day. I think our guide said she was allowed to have 40 liters for the whole day. We also talked to local shop owners, people who were buying things in these stores, tourist shop owners, a doctor from the clinic, members of the local water board, and other women who were at home.

The top five problems were water, education (mostly paying school fees for uniforms and materials), health, food security, and unemployment. They have a local water board, but even the members of the board that we interviewed admitted the program wasn't working. There just isn't enough water in the area to fully support all of the people. Apparently the two local tourist lodges help fund a lot of projects, which was interesting.

I can't say I was surprised at these interviews, but seeing all of this up close and personally talking to these people was… I don't know, there aren't really words. All of the people in my group and I agreed that we feel guilty that we get essentially unlimited clean water, food, electricity, and shelter in camp, even though to us the living is a bit more rough than we're used to. And trying to find solutions to these problems… well, it feels like a huge chunk of the world is trying to figure that out. These people are living like people did in the 1800s in America! But I also feel like it will be easier to go from this way of living to a more sustainable but comfortable way of living. In America we'll have to get used to not wasting so much if we're ever going to be sustainable. There have been some really interesting and intense discussions in my policy class about implementing economic development and sustainable living in rural villages in Africa. I also had a conversation with Kioko, my wildlife ecology professor, about population growth and barriers to economic development and sustainability.

Today was our community service day. I went to the children’s home sponsored by the Rhotia Valley Tented Lodge. This home was a lot nicer than I expected, complete with a playing field, playground, and comfortable buildings, similar to the ones we have in camp. It seemed like these children might live more comfortably than many other children in the area. We were actually joking that we wanted to switch locations with them! They could have our camp if we could have their place. These children have their primary and secondary school paid for, but they do have to walk a long way to schools.

We brought a ton of children’s books and then we read to them. The girl I was with could read English really well, so she read to me. I think she was probably 10 or 11. Apparently, primary school here is taught in Swahili, but secondary school is taught in English, and that switch can be very rough. Children also have to pass tests to get to certain grades, and my understanding is that they only get one chance for each test. After we had read for about an hour, then we played games with the children. We guessed what animals the younger children were pretending to be, we sang and danced the hokey pokey, we played Jenga using the building blocks, we had competitions on who could do the silliest things while balancing a lid with blocks on it on your head, and, of course, once one of the students pulled out her phone, half of them crowded around her and took lots of pictures. Then, the owner of the lodge invited us students up to visit the lodge itself. If anyone is interested in visiting Tanzania, I highly suggest the Rhotia Valley Lodge. Its location is breathtaking among rolling hills and farmland, plus, the income generated supports the children’s home.

Right now, we have lots of free time. There was supposed to be a Swahili class, but that was cancelled. Tomorrow we have another non-program day. We’re going back to Karatu! Last week we went to Mto wa Mbu, but I’ve decided I like Karatu much better. It’s less touristy, and there are less people following you around, waving necklaces in your face, and trying to get you to buy them.

Well, I’m going to work on my Swahili worksheet now. The power’s out again while I’m writing this, so I don’t know how long I’ll have to wait until I can actually post this. 

It only ended up being an hour or so! Yay!

RAP Poem

Every evening, we have something called RAP. I think it stands for Reflection and Presentation, and the mwanafunzi of the day (student of the day) leads the RAP. The first part is a recap of what happened that day, and then there are announcements, and then the MOD presents something. A lot of people have done games or shared a story. I decided to read I poem I had written about our sunrise hike and I thought I’d post it here.

Top of Moyo Hill at Sunrise

The west sides of the mountains hold on to the last of the night,

matching sky where Antares still outshines the morning.

Before the distant hillside forests,

the sunken misty air warms and rises.

Kilimanjaro and Meru fade into the brightening horizon.

Lake Manyara to the south below the famous diamond of stars,

its shallow, saline waters receding in the last of the dry season,

turns silver like cirrus clouds floating by a waning half-moon.

The ground here is the night sky at home,

few lights in the dark.

Slowly, plowed streaks gain color

with stripes in the sky—

red, grey, faintest hint of green—

until all is fully revealed:

the blinding sun over the mountains’ crests

and the Kili ma Tembo valley

below the rocky top of Moyo Hill.

First Two Trips to Lake Manyara National Park!

           The “field studies” part of this program really kicked into high gear this week. I went on my first trip to the African savanna to identify animal scat and learn about stratification between different animal groups. I also went to Lake Manyara National Park for the first time and experienced a game drive as well as taking observations out in the field. And for policy, my whole class got to take some of the PRA (Participatory Rural Appraisal) techniques we learned and conduct our own interviews and transect walks.

            The highlight was definitely driving around Lake Manyara National Park. We went on Thursday afternoon and Friday morning, and our professors gave us pretty simple assignments—probably because they knew we wouldn’t be able to concentrate too well when there was the possibility of seeing an elephant at every turn. For Thursday, we only had to make detailed observations of animals we saw in preparation for a short research paper, and on Friday we had to spend at least two hours with several different baboon troops observing their behavior. When we’re out in the field taking notes or driving around, I keep thinking about how these classes are pretty much like Field Natural History African Edition.          

Blue monkeys

            The way we drive around the parks is part of what makes the whole experience really fun. The tops of the cars come off (some come all of the way off and others come up enough for you to stand but still have a roof) and you stand on the seats with your upper body out of the car. Then you drive around looking for animals. It is incredibly exhilarating, especially when you’re scanning the grassland or forest for anything that moves. I suppose you could sit while you weren’t observing anything, but that’s boring. You also can’t get out of the cars in the park, but that’s fine because being up higher gives you a better vantage point.

            On Thursday, we drove around pretty aimlessly, looking for anything to observe. My car saw a lot of creatures: hornbills, blue monkeys, vervet monkeys, baboons, zebras, wildebeest, impala, warthogs, cape buffalo, ostriches, giraffes, elephants, and hippos. I decided to write my research paper on the grouping patterns of warthogs because I saw a lot of them. I think seeing the zebras, elephants, warthogs, giraffes, and ostriches were the coolest, but having the chance to get to know a bit about all of the things we saw through observation definitely made the experience more enjoyable and purposeful than just sitting and watching.

            On Friday, I was lucky enough to be in the car Kioko, our Wildlife Ecology professor, was driving. I got an incredible amount of information from him about baboons and the species of plants they were eating. After knocking out our two hours of observations, Kioko took us on a short game drive, where we saw more ostriches, giraffes, zebras, and our first national park kill, which was a dead frog that a bird had just caught. This bird was pretty dumb, though, and couldn’t figure out how to swallow the whole frog. We watched for about 10 minutes without him making any progress, and then had to drive back to the park entrance.

            We’re going back to Lake Manyara (just the outskirts and not the park itself) on Tuesday for another Wildlife Ecology class, which I am really excited for. We also have our first paper for WE due on Friday, which I am less excited for, but so far it’s been going well. All of the academics are really interesting and engaging. We had a good discussion in Policy about the pros and cons of building a highway through the Serengeti, and after birding for Ecology, Kioko and I had a discussion about population growth and living sustainably in Africa.

            For my next post, I hope to write about the experience I had with my practice PRA project. I won’t call it a highlight, but it was certainly a learning experience. This past week, I have become more and more happy to be here studying in Tanzania. I’ve always felt quite comfortable and at home in Moyo Hill, but I’ve really been caught up in a wave of excitement for what I’m doing!

           

Until next time,
Savanna

Some Picture Highlights

I finally got around to uploading pictures. Here are the highlights:

The gate into camp

One of the roads in Rhotia

The view from Kili ma Tembo. We had class here one morning.

The view on the other side of Kili ma Tembo.

My favorite picture that I've taken so far. This was during our first trip to the African savanna just outside of Lake Manyara National Park where we spent the whole afternoon looking at the effect livestock presence had on the distribution of wildlife based on animal scat. Many Maasai were grazing their herds of cows, sheep, and goats, and they came over to help us with scat identification. They didn't speak English or much Swahili, but it was fun learning the names of animals in Maa. 

A Good Morning

Today I woke up at 5:15am to go on a sunrise hike to the top of Moyo Hill.

I saw the southern cross.

Also, the sunrise.

It was a good morning.

The beginnings of the sunrise from the top of Moyo Hill.

The landscape below Moyo Hill.

Karatu

           February 7^th was our first non-program day. We had a group meeting two days before, and Mike, the student affairs manager, gave us suggestions for what we could possibly do. We decided on a morning hike to the Elephant Caves in the Ngorogoro conservation area and then an afternoon trip to the market in Karatu.

            Getting ready Sunday morning was pretty chill. We could’ve slept in until 8:00am, but it gets pretty loud here in the mornings around 6:00am, so most people got up between then and 7:00am. The morning sounds consist of roosters crowing (contrary to popular belief, they pretty much crow at all hours of the day, though thankfully not at night), cows mooing, dogs barking, birds singing, pots in the kitchen clanging, and the staff talking while starting out their day. We ate breakfast and packed up our lunches, which consisted of fried dough, fresh banana bread, hardboiled eggs, carrots and cucumbers, potatoes, apples, and a choice between peanut butter and jelly or Nutella sandwiches.

            The drive to Karatu from Rhotia is about 20 minutes, but the Elephant Caves hike was another fifteen or so minutes through a residential part of Karatu. That meant bumpy, dusty dirt roads, waving to all the children we passed, and waiting for people’s cows to walk past our cars.

            The start of our hike was near a coffee plantation owned by a German and a tourist lodge. Our group was broken into two groups, and each group got a guide. Our guide spoke pretty good English and was really knowledgeable about all of the plants we passed, giving us the scientific names, common names, and fun facts about their traditional use. It was just like a field natural history class! My favorite was Elephant or Maasai Perfume, which is this shrub-like plant that smells wonderful. I’d need to smell it again to attempt to describe it, but it is really nice. Apparently the Maasai use it to mask their scent so elephants can’t smell them.

            It was a gradual climb up a section of mountain, and we’d stop every once in a while to take pictures of the beautiful vistas. Near the top, there were two attractions: the waterfall and the elephant caves. We first saw the waterfall from far away; the water level was very low, but the drop was impressive.

            The elephant caves were amazing! They’re not really caves, but holes in the side of the mountainside dug by elephants with their tusks. According to our guide, elephants travel from very far away to this area where they’ll carve out part of the mountain with their tusks to get at the minerals in the rocks. The elephants need the minerals so they can effectively digest their food. Even so, they only digest about 45% of what they eat. Other animals come to the area too, after the elephants have dug out enough minerals. These minerals came from a volcanic eruption many millennia ago, the eruption that actually formed the Ngorogoro Crater (which is technically a caldera and not a crater), the place I’m most excited to see.

            After exploring this uneven mountainside, our guide took us to the very top of the waterfall we’d seen from afar. It turns out that the gigantic drop we saw was only the first of two large drops. We were able to stand on the side of the stream pretty close to the edge of the cliff and look down.

            After the hike, some of the girls changed into skirts and everyone ate their lunches. The general rule while walking around the villages and towns in Tanzania is to have everything from your knees to your shoulders covered, preferably with something baggy. Women can wear long pants, but mostly it is only the younger generation of Tanzanians that do so. If you want attempt to avoid looking like a complete tourist, which isn’t that effective when you and your peers are usually the only white people around, it’s best to wear a skirt.

            We drove back into Karatu and were let loose in the market. It was completely overwhelming—there were people and animals everywhere! I can’t even estimate how large an area this market covered, but it was very extensive. For people who are familiar with Cleveland’s Westside Market, maybe about that size and as crowded as a Saturday morning. Except it was all outdoors and most of the stalls were just blankets laid on the ground. In the livestock section, people were selling cows, chickens, sheep, donkeys, and goats. There was a butcher section with very, very, very fresh meat. The most common foods I saw were bananas, potatoes, carrots, watermelons, and very small, dried fish. There were also fabrics, recycled clothes, and shoes, and then there were people walking around with plastic bags on sticks selling the bags.

            I bought fabric from one of the vendors, though I didn’t really have to barter because I was with Becky, the intern for our program. She can speak Swahili and she had haggled with the same vendor already, so I got my fabric for the same price (10,000 Tanzanian shillings, which is roughly 5 or 6 US dollars). I’m getting pretty good with my Swahili numbers, though, so next time I hope to give haggling a try.

            I went back to the cars pretty soon after, and then sat and talked with Costa, one of the drivers. We talked in semi-English, semi-Swahili (mostly English) about things similar to this market in the United States. I told him a bit about malls and grocery stores, and then we tried to compare the price of food in the US vs. Tanzania. I didn’t know many prices of the things he wanted to compare, like a kilogram of rice, so it didn’t really work out. His impression was that food in America was more expensive, which, compared to the prices here, it is. Average income is extraordinarily more in American than here (I believe the average in the area is $150-$200 a month), so perhaps considering the differences in income makes the food more comparably priced? I haven’t bought any food here yet, but maybe I will find out more about this. The Coca-Cola is very cheap though. One of my friend’s bought one for 600 shillings, which is less than 50 cents; the bottle was 400 shillings though. Normally you’d drink the Coke there and then give the bottle back, but she decided to keep it.

            Once everyone started heading back from the market to the vehicles, vendors started swarming us, sticking necklaces and woven bowels into the open windows. That’s pretty common whenever we leave Rhotia, even if a few of us are walking down a main street people will appear out of no where with all sorts of things and try to put them in your hands. They are extremely persistent, even when you try to ignore them and say hapana (no) over and over.

            After our market excursion, we were all driven to the restaurant Happy Days, which was designated our meeting place any other time we go into Karatu. It is a very nice, secluded restaurant, pretty close to one of the tourist lodges where we have the chance to go swimming later in the semester. We all got something cold to drink and sat around the porch, exhausted after our hike and market experience.

            A few people and I went into the main part of Karatu after sitting around for a bit. It was about a 10 and 15-minute walk into town, and then we walked down the main street looking at a few shops. It was hard to tell, in some cases, exactly what these shops were since I know little Swahili, but it was interesting to see a more urban, bustling town in Tanzania. To be clear, Karatu isn’t a huge city in US terms, it’s “downtown” area is along a single road with brightly colored buildings, shacks, and carts on both sides. There are a few roads that turn off the main road and into more rural area, like the road to Happy Days.

                        Once we were done exploring, my group headed back to Happy Days. I had my first refrigerated bottle of water since getting here (most of the water we get in camp ranges from cool to tepid), and then got in one of the cars to head back. To be honest, I kind of forget what we did for the rest of the evening because I was so tired! Probably reading for class. We don’t have too much reading usually; sometimes the policy stuff gets pretty lengthy, but the academics so far have not been strenuous.

            Hopefully I will be able to upload pictures from this trip soon. I got some pretty epic pictures today during my first trip to the African savanna, so by the time I write an entry for that, I will try to have pictures too.

Until next time,

Savanna

Birthdays!

             There are a ton of birthdays in the student group and staff during the three and half months that I will be in Tanzania. We’ve celebrated three already! The way people celebrate birthdays here is really fun. After dinner, all of the lights are turned off. A few people go outside the chumba (dining hall), get the cake and candles from the kitchen, and pick twigs off of the nearby trees. Then, they line up and walk through the chumba singing a song and waving the branches. One person sings one part that has many different verses, and everyone else sings a response that is always the same. The song itself is not in Swahili but the Iraqw language, which is the language that people in Rhotia speak. (Side-note: Tazania has 124 different tribes, most, if not each, have their own language. The people of Rhotia are from the Iraqw tribe). This song goes on for a good amount of time, four or five minutes, and people start whistling and jumping up and down. Towards the end, two guys will link their arms together and make a seat for the birthday person. They then proceed to swing this person back and forth a few times. When the song finishes, the birthday person gets to blow out the candles, and usually everyone will also sing “Happy Birthday.” The cake then gets cut up into little squares, placed into bowls, and passed around to each person. The cake is extremely delicious— quite dense and a hint of almond flavor. The frosting is pretty much a really thick sugar glaze that is sometimes dyed different colors.

            When we were celebrating a birthday yesterday, I was standing next to Patricia, one of the cooks. After the Iraqw song finished, we both immediately jumped into “Happy Birthday,” but everyone else started clapping. Instead of following everyone else, we proceed to scream “Happy Birthday” as loud as we could, and then, of course, right after we finished singing, everyone else broke into “Happy Birthday.” We both thought that was pretty funny, so we were laughing and hugging each other while everyone else stared in confusion.

            That is just one example of the great moments I have had with the staff. Despite the fact that most of them speak little English and all of us students speak even less Swahili, we all manage to find something to laugh about. The other night during a campfire, one of the guards entertained us with his imitations of various African wildlife, including hyenas and baboons “arguing.” He’s also been teaching us the song Jambo Bwana which is an old pop song that is now mostly sung only to tourists. It’s super catchy, though.  

            I’ve gotten the chance to walk around Rhotia a bit and meet some of the children. I also went on a beautiful and educational hike yesterday, as well as, to the market in Karatu. But… I’m going to save all of those crazy adventures for another entry!

Savanna