Third post

August 14

I just watched the strangest Coke ad I've ever seen. It involved people drinking Coke and then saying “Brrrr” and shaking. Somehow this is supposed to be cool and sell more Coke? So, how about the Olympics? I catch odd snippets in the mornings before the workshop starts at 9am, which means I've watched way too much volleyball and not enough of anything really interesting.

Yesterday, I hit rock bottom on the boredom scale. I just sat through hours of Swahili and kind of wanted to cry most of the afternoon. Way to be hit with culture shock, Lexy, now that your trip is almost over. Oh well. After the workshop ended for the day, Edson and I walked (walked!) down the street to the Hasty Tasty Too for dinner. It's run by an Arab family and serves range of Swahili and Zanzibari food. I had vegetable curry, which was a nice respite after three days of almost exclusively dining on meat and carbohydrates. Edson and I spoke about a number of things, including why the workshop attendees are 85% male. It turns out that most of CARE's employees are men too. This is apparently not because CARE hasn't tried to attract more female employees, but when job openings are posted, the replies are almost exclusively from men. Edson went on to tell me, though, that universities in Tanzania are enacting very good affirmative action policies for women and offering them scholarships that are not available to men. Hopefully this will increase the number of women in the job market in the coming years and make the gender balance more fair in such pro-women organizations like CARE.

Today I did a lot better. Instead of trying to pay attention to the workshop, I just worked on my computer. The manual needs a lot of work, and I don't think I'm going to have the time to finish it! I have to get in work on it when I can. Today was the last day of the workshop and we ended a couple of hours early so people could leave at a decent time. I took Rama up on his offer to drive me around Iringa so I could at least say I'd seen the place. He also had a couple of errands to run. First, he needed to pick up cooking oil. White people come to Iringa because it's the nearest city to Ruaha National Park and for the stone-age ruins near by. Tanzanians come to Iringa because it's the source of cheap sunflower oil. We drove up one of the many mountains to a small “industry” as Rama called it, where a bunch of men were sifting through piles of sunflower seeds. They were surrounded by their own small mountain of seed bags, and there must have been several tons lying on the ground. Rama bought 40 liters of oil: 20 for his family and 20 for Edson's. In Dar, that amount apparently goes for 60,000/=, but in Iringa you can get it for less than 40,000/=. (In US terms, that's $34 for 5 gallons of cooking oil).

Next we had to pick up shoes from a guest house that one of the participants had left. He lives in Morogoro, so I suppose we'll be dropping them off tomorrow. We passed by a view of a valley that literally took my breath away. I don't remember that ever happening before, but it was so beautiful and came into sight so suddenly that it made me gasp for air. On the way back into city center, I made Rama stop so I could take a photograph. I told him I was having a “mtalii moment” (tourist). The photos don't do it justice. Oh well. We're heading home tomorrow, very early I in the morning. We're leaving early so I can have another “mtalii moment” when we drive through Mikume National Park. The animals are active early in the morning, so we're leaving at 6am so we can arrive when it's still cool outside. Hoot!