Kuuliza si ujinga

I’m off to Moshi for the week for a seminar on AIDS education. It is a much, much needed break. I left yesterday, a day early, and am currently visiting a friend who teaches at a school between my site and Moshi. It’s the first time I’ve been more than an hour away from my site since arriving, and the first time I’ve seen someone from my training group since December 1st.
The journey to Moshi begins with me walking the 2 kilometers from my house to the main road to town in the hot, mid-day sun. As I walk along the dirt road gazing at corn fields, mud huts, and views of the mountain that contains Ngorongoro Crater, one of the school guards rides by on his bicycle and takes one of my two backpacks for me. I meet him and the backpack when I arrive at the main road.
Then, we wait. There are few cars to town at mid-day; he waits with me for forty-five minutes before a bus to Arusha comes through. I board the bus and we’re off to town.
I don’t take the bus all the way to Arusha; I get off at the bus stand in town. When I reach the bus stand, a woman calls out to me from a hoteli near the bus stand “Karibu, welcome!”
It’s definitely past lunchtime and my stomach is grumbling, so I enter the hoteli and eat some of the best beans and rice I’ve had in Tanzania. They even had salsa! And it was half the usual price, only 500 shillings! Some days I have to worry about being cheated because I’m white. Other days I end up with far better deals than I could ever have hoped for. I figured things balance out in the end.
Spent some time on the Internet in town, and picked up the mail my sitemate had dropped off for me at the Internet café. Yep, delivery systems in Tanzania generally involve leaving things with random people you sort of know and hoping they reach their destination. And surprisingly, this system usually.
After the Internet, I headed back to the bus stand and boarded a minibus headed toward Arusha. Got off after about two hours sort of near my friend’s school, boarded a daladala that brought me closer to the school, and then asked random people for directions and was escorted to the school first by two young women, then by two secondary school students. Of course it turned out my friend had been waiting for me at the daladala stop . . . but thanks to the fact that cell phones have come to Tanzania, we found each other in the end.
And tomorrow, we’re off to Moshi. And it will be time for more fun with Tanzanian transportation. Traveling in Tanzania: chaotic, random, and unpredictable. But it usually works out. And no matter what, it always makes a good story.