Tanzanie*

As I was leaving America after my trip home for Christmas and New Years I told everyone they would see me again by June. I had 2 options: finish my service as usual sometime in May or I extend for a year to do some Environmental Education work in the National Park, in which case I would take my month of home leave in June and probably try to be home for the 4th of July... Well, because I'm me, I managed to figure out another option.

I was planning to finish off the school year in village, which is usually sometime in June around me (the academic year technically goes into July a little bit, but once the rains start all most of the teachers head back to the villages to farm). However, this year with all the strikes througout the country (and here) for various reasons a decision was made to push the school year back (built in strike-days instead of snow-days?); option B was an Année Blanche where the entire academic year doesn't count. Nobody wants an Année Blanche if they can help it.

Choices are hard

Around the time the news of the extended school year broke another volunteer in my region, CJ, found out about a Permaculture Design Certification Course (PDC) being held in Tanzania in June. It sounded pretty interesting, something I've wanted to know more about, and so I told him to keep me in the loop if he decided to do it. It quickly became obvious that both of us wanted to do the course, so I sent an email to my supervisor in Dakar asking if I could do the training, them come back for another month or so, then COS (Close of Service). In return I would help to create training materials for Peace Corps Senegal. A couple weeks later I got the okay and at the end of May we flew - on my brother's birthday in fact.

The trip started off... well... it seems CJ and I forgot how planes and security work. Turns out knives aren't allowed. Luckily this occurred to us just before we went through security so CJ called another volunteer and paid for him to pick up our contraband items (one of CJ's knives had nostalgic value). That whole issue was made up for when CJ found cans of Budweiser in the Duty Free shop - it's no Royal Dutch, but it made waiting for our delayed flight go faster.

Fun Fact: It wound up being cheaper for us to fly into Nairobi, Kenya then travel overland to Arusha than it was for us to fly into Tanzania. That in mind we decided to spend a couple days in Nairobi before heading down to the PDC in Arusha. Now, if you ever find yourself with a short time in Nairobi I have 2 places you want to go. First we hit up the Giraffe Center, almost right off the plane. We managed to get a free ride from where we were staying because of a small world incident where CJ happened to have gone to school with a girl who was doing some development work there with a group of very nice people who happened to have a car. The Giraffe Center is where you want to go if you want to get up close and personal with giraffes, they have a sweet little set up and their educational component was light-years ahead of anything I've seen in Senegal. As we were dropped off at the center CJ promised our friendly drivers that we would hug some giraffes, we all laughed and they drove away... then we hugged some giraffes.

Must see number two is The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust. We went there on our second day because we missed our window of opportunity on day one. They are only open to the public a couple hours in the morning because they are doing other things with the elephants. They seem to have a pretty well designed system to return their orphaned elephants to the wild. They also happen to have a blind Black Rhino who can't be released to the wild. This is your chance to get up close and personal with all these guys. The rhino is obviously in a cage, but the elephants only have a small rope to separate them from you - the bottom line is you can touch any of them, so I did. The big thing I learned here is that baby elephants are very gassy and that farts are still funny across cultures and across species.

Another note if you're spending time in Nairobi is that it has earned the nickname Nai-robbery and heard stories confirming that. With that in mind we were fairly cautious and never went out alone and acted like reverse vampires and as we saw the sun was getting a little too low we fled the city and stuck to our hostel. Outside of all that I really enjoyed the city. Public transport was easy enough to figure out, the streets were very clean, and we met a lot of very nice people and only a couple who were a little sketchy. We happened to be there around an Independence Day so there was a little fair going on in a park - the highlight there for me was the man-powered Ferris Wheel. There were 2 men standing at the bottom turning it by hand; they had a pretty good rhythm and had it going pretty fast.

Tippy Tap + Pepinere!

From Nairobi we took a bus to Arusha, Tanzania for the PDC. CJ and I were definitely outsiders having come all the way from West Africa, but those coming from East Africa were spread out enough that our inputs were still very much appreciated. Most of the participants were born and raised in various East African countries, but there were a handful of us from America, Great Britain, and Australia. The course itself was hosted by the Australian non-profit foodwatershelter, and taught by a permaculturalist from New Hampshire; an international endeavor to say the least.

Before I comment on the course I should probably provide my quick explanation of what permaculture is. Permaculture is a design ethic for farms/gardens/homes that takes into account the needs of people and the environment into account to create a sustainable system. Think maximum production with minimum long-term inputs. It's something that is scalable to any size, be it your flower box or your commercial farm. Okay, enough of the sales pitch, on to my comments on the course. I was hoping for more on the technical end of things (e.g. what plants work well together), but realistically the international nature of this PDC made that difficult. What we did get in the course though were the tools to figure this out on our own and an amazing group of contacts in the other participants to bounce ideas off of. Also the design portion of the course was pretty new to me. How to build maps and layer them with the information you need and want to make an informed design.

After the course CJ and I said goodbye to our new friends and ran off to Moshi for a couple days. Moshi is the launching spot for most people headed to Mount Kilimanjaro, and if you've come this far it seems to make sense that you want to at least see that one. Well I wanted to touch it too, so we made our way to the gates of the park knowing we would never actually cross that line... it gets really expensive really fast, and as Peace Corps Volunteers we can't really afford that. We did take our pictures at the park gate though and had a beautiful hike back down to the cars back to our hostel.

From there we headed back to Arusha and met up with one of our new friends from the course, Lucie, an herbalist researching traditional Massai medicinal plant knowledge. The Massai are a very popular people group in East Africa, mostly because they are still very nomadic in their ways. She brought us out to her village for a few days and we got to see part of a Circumcision Ceremony before heading on to our next stop. This time Lucie followed us around as we headed to an area called Endasaki where we met up with another Peace Corps Volunteer. She happens to be partnered up with a volunteer from our neck of the woods in Senegal. He gave us some things for her, and she gave us a few things to bring back for him.

With that our Tanzanian adventure came to a close. We headed back to Arusha and took a bus back to Nairobi where we spent the night at the airport and made our way safely back to Senegal to start trying to apply some of what we learned to our world.