One of the best parts of being in Tanzania is getting to enjoy new and different cultural experiences. It is this neverending pursuit of broadened perspectives that led our hostel to attend to 13th annual Miss Kilimanjaro competition. We loaded up on a couple of bottles of Konyagi (Tanzanian spirit, $3.50 for a 1/2 litre bottle) and showed up ready to roll. The competition itself was fairly lame, and seemed more like a competetion for strippers than a beauty pagent as people would come up to the stage and give the girls money as they danced. Despite this, there were quite a few good local bands who performed which salvaged the night. The highlight of the night was this fat middle aged Tanzanian in front of us, who somehow felt the need to be the only person in the audience standing up and dancing with the choreographed performance. Of course his dance moves were not in sync with the performers and he mainly just rubbed his man-breasts as if to say "Mmmmmm I should be Mr. Kilimanjaro". Many drinks and cat calls increased this mans courage to the point that he ran up on stage and started dancing with the girls. Oddly enough, nobody did anything and after a while he grew bored and went back to his seat. Only in Moshi.
The next morning we were going out to Genesis' house for our pig roast. This was our second time out to the region but our first time actually meeting his family. If there is a heaven, I would imagine it looks something like the plot of land where the Kiwelu family lives. His house is situated about 10km outside of Moshi threw fairly thick rainforest style jungle filled with black and white colubus monkeys. The family has a very nice european style home and about 2 acres of land where they grow mangos, maize, beans, berries, coffee beans, bananas, tomatoes and hot peppers. They also kept around 40 chickens, some pigs, a couple cows, and a couple bee hives for honey. We met his four kids, who are probably the kindest children we have ever met. The food was absolutely incredible, which can only be expected when everything is just fresh from the land. Everybody had an excellent day, except for a certain someone who had too much Konyagi the night before and had to make several quick exits during the afternoon to empty their stomache.
Work has been going very well the past week or so. Besides our usual visits and presentations we have also been experimenting with a couple of our American friends at the hostel building cheaper and more efficient technologies to introduce to the community. The first things built were a stove and oven which will greatly reduce fuel and woods costs for project operators who run small restaurant businesses. To celebrate our success we whipped up some batter and deep fried a Mars bar on our stove, which was sensational. The other project we are working on is building a home made incubator since about 20% of the businesses we have met are poultry keeping projects. Buying an incubator here can be really expensive (Between $500 and $800) and we found a design to make one for closer to $20 so we decided to go around and look for the parts.
We split up to cover more ground quicker but met up with our friend Jake around lunch to pick up the goods. He was very excited to tells us about this paranoid schizoprehenic who runs an electric shop where he had found most of the electrical goods we needed. Apparently the owner had cornered Jake and told him how almost every business in town was actually a drug front and everyone in town was blind to the fact except for him. He needed our help to raise awareness so we could smash these internaional drug rings. Excited to meet this man we rushed into the shop, totally unprepared for what was waiting for us.
When we got to his store the man quickly shook our hands and without wasting any further words handed us a hand written note on a piece of construction paper. The note basically said the following - We need to watch, analyze, study, and scrutinize the comings and goings of people, particularly women, who were part of an international drug smuggling operation. These drug barons were restaurants, internet cafes, jewelers, hotels, and every other business. After this he asked us where we were from, and began rambling about the followers of Aga Khan who have set up a huge drug dealing network in Canada and told us we needed to be very careful of these people. As if to pick up his claims on drug traffickers he began pulling out scores of newspaper articles, some about 2 years, about drug busts that had taken place. We thanked him for enlightening us, paid for our goods and bid him a fond farewell.
Back at home we began the process of wiring our incubator. We were using a dimmer switch, since this allows you to control the temperature of the incubator better but on our first attempt we only managed to light up the bulb without dimming. Undaunted we spliced the cables, rewired the dimmer, and taped it back together. We learned this was a bad (and dangerous) idea when there was a small explosion when we plugged the light back in. Luckily, we had bought extra wire and were able to discard the old wire and wire our light back up again. This time, the second we put the light in the socket the power in the entire house went out. Unsure if this was due to us or just a coincedence as the power had been flickering earlier we tried again in 15 minutes once the electricity was back up. Turns out it was us. We wanted to try again, but nay sayers like Katie Baglole put an end to that idea. Clearly she isn't as interested in saving Africa as we are.
Besides our heroics we have had a recent change in plans for our travel itinerary. Previously we had planned to climb Kili around the 3rd week of June but realized that they were better things we could be going with $1200 per person. This better things materialized in the form of a 2 week trip to Uganda and Rwanda. The highlight of this trip will be gorilla trekking in Bwindi national park in Uganda, where you hike through the rainforest up to a family of silverbacks and just sit and hang out with them for an hour while they go about their daily lives. We finally got in touch with both the Ugandan and Rwandan tourism boards early last week to inquire about availability. Rwanda was booked solid, and Uganda only had permits available on the 12th of June. So long story short, on 3 days notice we decided to drop everything and boot it across country for the trip. We also plan to go white water rafting at the source of the nile, spend a couple days canoeing and mountain biking on Lake Bunyoni and many other things. The whole thing just seems like much more value for the money than just climbing Kili (which I would still love to do some day).
Anyways we have a few more little stories to share, such as our recent "business trip" to Same, but are running short on time since our 26 hour bus trip leaves in a little under 2 hours.
