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.
