It’s really a beautiful place; I loved the clime and the food. Actually we had a cook which cooked for us! Well, I have to admit that slowly I was getting tired of pasta, rice, beans and lentils, but at least they are very nutritive.. :-)
Unfortunately my swahili was and remains very bad, so that I couldn't communicate with the people there. They seem very nice, but as a white person you really feel how everybody is looking at you. You feel that for many you are just another of these white people that go to Africa for a safari. Then when they hear that we are working here, they become friendlier. But this idea that white people can pay for everything and have not to look for money is still impressed in their mind and sometimes it makes life difficult. But in general people are very nice and very curious to know what we were doing, etc.
The first day we were in Dar es Salam to walk a bit around and buy our chicken wire needed for our experiments. It’s a nice city, but you really see that poverty is still a big problem there. I noticed this once more when I went into a shop to buy some food.
Most of the chips, cakes or whatever were expired since January 2008 (I was there on June 2009). But I got used to it. I mean, I lived in a house where we kept giraffe dung and food in the same fridge..
As they say there: hamna shida, which means “there is no problem”. Actually I think hamna shida is the thing that people there say the most often! I mean there are soooo many problems that should be resolved that you just have to smile and say, hamna shida.. Otherwise you would go crazy.
I think the biggest problem for us girls was that people here don’t use to think. They really don’t organize anything or think about consequences. This brought us in some troubles: we had to buy food every 2 weeks and bring it from the north to the south of the park, were most people were most of the time. Well, the cook just left most of the food in the north, so that we had not enough in the south and, when Jud and I went back to the north we could throw away most of the fruits and vegetables we bought.
As they say there: hamna shida, which means “there is no problem”. Actually I think hamna shida is the thing that people there say the most often! I mean there are soooo many problems that should be resolved that you just have to smile and say, hamna shida.. Otherwise you would go crazy.
I think the biggest problem for us girls was that people here don’t use to think. They really don’t organize anything or think about consequences. This brought us in some troubles: we had to buy food every 2 weeks and bring it from the north to the south of the park, were most people were most of the time. Well, the cook just left most of the food in the north, so that we had not enough in the south and, when Jud and I went back to the north we could throw away most of the fruits and vegetables we bought.
Another example is the fact that in the north we didn’t had any water for almost two weeks. So we had to take water out from the reserve under the house. We thought that there should be a possibility to pump this water into the house, but no one could explain us how. So we used to fill bottles and tanks to bring them in the house. Well, a guy finally explained us how to do that and told us that our cook knows how it works. However, when we told Benjamin, the cook, that we didn’t had water, he just sayd “oohhh”... So, we had always to tell them everything and ask for everything, because they would never come to the idea to say “by the way...”. But, as I said... hamna shida. :-)
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