Jambo Rafiki!

The first few days in Arusha have been amazing!  I was greeted at the Kilimanjaro airport by a few very nice TVE employees and was then driven back to the volunteer house where I will be living.  Right now, there are 4 other volunteers living in the house along with a cook, house manager, and security guard.  We are served 3 very filling meals a day which each take about 4 hours to prepare- all the meals are made from scratch by our house cook J  Believe it or not, avocados are served with lunch almost everyday!! Anddd there is a big tub of peanut butter! I guess that plan to drop a quick 10 pounds while I am here has already gone down the drain.

I slept most of the day on Saturday trying to recover from the very long trip and then on Sunday a few of us walked around Sakina (the part of Arusha we live in).  The main roads are paved but all of the neighborhoods are down windy dirt roads that do not have names so it is very easy to get lost. Good thing we brought Nancy, one of the house managers, with us!  We wandered through a bunch of roads around our house to say hi to everyone and learn the walk home from town.  All of the kids were coming out of their houses to stare at us and follow us around because it’s not so often that “Mzungu” or white people are hanging around.  One little girl even started to cry and run away because she was scared of us, she had never see a white person before!  We let her touch our hands so she could see we weren’t any different but I’m pretty sure we still thought we were scary monsters.

I have already learned a bunch of basic phrases in Swahili and I start language classes tomorrow so hopefully I will be able to have a basic conversation soon. Many people here speak English but I think the kids and employees at the orphanage speak only Swahili so it’s important that I start learning quickly. Zaki, the security guard, and Hilda & Elouisa (the cooks) have been teaching me a lot of short phrases so in return I taught them how to do the Chicken dance, which they think is hilarious.  Tomorrow I will show them how to do the Electric Slide and the two of the girls from Mexico are teaching everyone the Macarena. I asked Lillian and Celia if they would speak Spanish with me at night so I can practice that too- before you know it, I will be tri-lingual! (and maybe a better dancer?)

Today I had orientation where I met all of the other volunteers that are starting their placements tomorrow.  Most volunteers are in their young 20s but there are a few volunteers that are a little older than that and one lady who was celebrating her 75^th birthday by volunteering for 3 weeks!  In our group there are volunteers from all over the US, Norway, Canada, Mexico, Ireland, Australia, and England and we are placed at a bunch of different schools, orphanages, and clinics around the city.  After getting to know everyone, all 23 of jumped into a “dalla dalla” and enjoyed a very crowded and sweaty, 10-minute ride to the city center.  The “dalla dalla” is a system of vans that operate similar to buses in the US but they are much smaller and are totally cool with piling in an absurd amount of people, even if they are hanging off the side of the car. They also only cost 300 shillings for one ride, the equivalent of about 20 cents- can you believe that!? Walking through the city was a little hectic for the first time, especially in a big group of Mzungu but it isn’t even close to the size of NYC so I’m sure I will get the hang of it pretty quickly.

Tomorrow I start working at Save Africa Orphanage with Matt, my friend from NY, and Karlina, one of the girls in my house from Norway.  The orphanage houses about 70 kids ranging from the ages of 3-7. Only 12 of the kids sleep there over night and the rest go home to their relatives or foster families.  I spoke with a girl today who had been working at Save Africa for the last 5 weeks; she said it’s a little disorganized and there are a lot of crazy kids but it was really fun. I guess our work is cut out for us!