General Stuff...

January 14, 2019

General stuff….

Corrections: It seems that I’ve made some miss-spellings and miss-identifications.

Dalidali are the vans that take people around Arusha.  They don’t go into the downtown part but they circle around it so you can get close.  It costs about 20¢ while a taxi is about $4.50.

Boda Boda are the motorbikes which carry people and their goods. I don’t know what they cost and don’t really want to know.  These are the vehicles that move quickly and generally play games of chicken at each intersection. The passengers often carry interesting things.  In addition to the car windshield carried by one passenger, I saw a woman with a toddler on one hip and a bag of groceries on the other. How did she ever hang on as the bike wove in and out of traffic! Yesterday I saw a woman with a lovely head of hair in flowing braids carrying a helmet.  Janet said that she probably didn’t want to risk lice. Or maybe she didn’t want to mess up her “do.”

When John and I walked behind Kundayo, we saw banana trees and we saw a man cutting off limbs of a tree.  That was not a banana tree.  People cut off tree limbs to cut up and make into firewood or charcoal.  It’s quite a problem and can cause deforestation or, at the very least, a lot of damaged trees.

I notice that I have a few grammar and sentence structure errors. (sigh!)  And I always liked teaching writing. Maybe I can blame it on the relaxed brain of retirement.

Big Frustration.  I have to laugh at myself at this one because before coming here one of the things I decided to examine was my relationship to technology.  It seems to take over my life in Spokane and I wanted to explore other aspects of my values and priorities without being constantly hooked up.  YET, I fell into the trap of allowing the technology to control me.  The internet at Kundayo is not strong enough to upload pictures to the blog.  Last week, the internet was so wimpy, I couldn’t even save regular text on the blog.  So, I bought a SMILE device which is a portable wifi gizmo. I was so happy that I blindly and cheerfully used up ½ of my data in about 3 days. I carelessly surfed the web, watched little vids and basically wasted my data.  Granted, I didn’t know how it all worked. I thought that if I just turned the wifi off on my devices, it would be ok, but sadly, I discovered that as long as the gizmo was connected to my computer it was blasting wifi and using data even if I wasn’t around to click and drag.  Now, I doubt if I have enough data left to post with photos so I’ll have to take a trip downtown to the SMILE office to buy more data.  Probably tomorrow I’ll do this since today is laundry day. Meanwhile, I am once again resolved to take back control of my life. Using only Kundayo internet for texting and emailing and viewing will help.  That means that I have to be mindful and go to the courtyard to use technology.

And speaking of the blog…. It seems that one must have a google account in order to post comments and then one must “register” or something to be in the comment group.  I’m not sure how this works but I do check email about every day so that would be one way to make comments, even if they wouldn’t be public.  I’m new to this blogging thing so I’m not sure how to fix stuff.  There must be a way to open up comments to everyone.

Adventures.  I define adventures as anything that happens when I step foot out of Kundayo.  Going down the street to get produce is an adventure. There are all sorts of people doing interesting things. The paths and sidewalks are pretty much broken up and sometimes narrow, or non-existent so just walking is sometimes an adventurous challenge. When I’m downtown, standing on the sidewalk to look at my map is an adventure. I am approached by all kinds of young men wanting to sell me maps and tee shirts and paintings and bracelets.  John says “thank you” (“asante”) and moves on.  I need to learn a firm NO (hapana!) to add to the thank you.  Maneuvering through the shops and the markets is a mysterious adventure and interacting with the street vendors who sell roasted corn and other goods is a fun adventure. The confusing act of trying to figure out the cost of things is quite the math adventure since $1 = 2,302 Tanzanian Schillings. Since I am number challenged in the best of times, I don’t know if I’m paying a few cents or a few dollars for something.  Yesterday, I saw a flyer advertising a used car for sale in the millions—TZS.  It was actually less than $1000.  If I get lucky, maybe I can find a safari deal for a million or two. (LOL!)  Even when I’m on overload with all the sensory input, I’m having an exciting adventure.

...and so it goes.