Thursday, July 17, 2008

The rain falls mainly on the dirt road...

Last night, the Barkers convinced me to go play tennis with them in the morning. They seem to relish waking up early, because our departure time for the tennis courts was 6am. So I got up at 5:30am, put on some already dirty clothes, ate a bagel and then followed them out the door. The trip was about 20 minutes by bike (I'm so out of shape and my legs burned most of the way) to a place called the Norwegian Club, which sounds a lot fancier than it actually was. The club is right behind the International School, which I'd seen on a drive around the city, so I sort of knew where I was.

We played for maybe 20 minutes before the skies opened up. The rainy season is over, so these little showers normally last a couple of minutes and are pretty light. This one, however, was a decent downpour and we were all thoroughly soaked. When it finished, the court was too wet for us to play, so we packed up and headed out. The route back to the Barker's house is about 5 miles of dirt road, which had turned to mud by now. My bike didn't have any fenders on it, and by the time I made it back, I was covered from the waist down in road mud. Blegch. Good thing I've been waiting to do laundry...

I took a shower and phoned the CARE offices to send a driver to pick me up. It was only 8am and I was already done with bikes for the day.

Today I've been researching various donor organizations who have previously funded governance programming in Tanzania. It was a little boring, but I recorded a bunch of web addresses for future reference. When I finally start writing my MA paper, I think these will come in handy.

1 comment:

MadFlacc said...

Incidentally: the time-warp effect of reading this post tagged 3:30 pm at 11:30 am the same day is pretty amusing.