We arrived in Dodoma on 14th Jan after a 7 hour bus journey through a surprisingly green and tropical looking Africa – it’s the rainy season which is apparently the reason for the current lusciousness. There are lots of ‘Christmas trees’ – nothing like fir trees but they have big red flowers all over them for Christmas and through January.
Dodoma is nothing like Dar es Salaam. Although it’s the administrative capital, it really is just a town with very few amenities. The climate however is great- much cooler than Dar.
The Jesuit community here is lovely - I’ve never been subjected to so much football in my life though. They’re in the middle of the Africa cup & they’re all passionate supporters of the Premiership so between the two it seems they’re never without a match...
I think we’ve been lucky
with accommodation too – the volunteer house (in picture) has the perk of screens on the windows & doors which means few mosquitoes and more to the point – no giant moths! There are only 3 of us at the moment – Erin and me plus Mira, a German volunteer who’s been here for 4 months, has a good grounding in Kiswahili and knows how to avoid being charged ‘mzungu’ (white) prices at the market! So, the house is fine – the call to prayer at 5am every morning which next door’s cow & cockerel join in with gusto is less so...
So far we’ve just been finding our feet, visiting the various projects and trying to decide which to get involved in. I’ve been surprised at the standard of provision at all of the projects. The Jesuits have done a great job of securing both international aid and local support – we had dinner on Friday with the Education Minister and the Water minister. They seem to know how to get everyone on side and it shows in the projects!
There are glaring differences between what I’ve seen here and the lack of support and development available for Tamils in Sri Lanka though. Tanzania is apparently one of the darlings of the aid donor community and while I’m sure its not the case all over, the places we’ve seen really are testament to how far that aid can go when combined with local vision and drive.
At the moment I know I’ll be teaching at St. Ignatius primary school for part of the week but I’m hoping to combine that with time in the local orphanage or youth centre. School only starts back tomorrow from the summer holidays but we had a tour yesterday which included visiting the cows which provide the milk for the children’s porridge breakfast, the chickens who provide meat & eggs for lunch and more disturbingly the desperately cute bunnies... I think I’m going to have to get over this squeamishness though – so far we’ve tucked into goat and were gleefully informed yesterday that we were eating ‘bush meat’ – no one could quite agree whether it was antelope or zebra, but it beat goat whatever!
Dodoma is nothing like Dar es Salaam. Although it’s the administrative capital, it really is just a town with very few amenities. The climate however is great- much cooler than Dar.
The Jesuit community here is lovely - I’ve never been subjected to so much football in my life though. They’re in the middle of the Africa cup & they’re all passionate supporters of the Premiership so between the two it seems they’re never without a match...
I think we’ve been lucky
with accommodation too – the volunteer house (in picture) has the perk of screens on the windows & doors which means few mosquitoes and more to the point – no giant moths! There are only 3 of us at the moment – Erin and me plus Mira, a German volunteer who’s been here for 4 months, has a good grounding in Kiswahili and knows how to avoid being charged ‘mzungu’ (white) prices at the market! So, the house is fine – the call to prayer at 5am every morning which next door’s cow & cockerel join in with gusto is less so...So far we’ve just been finding our feet, visiting the various projects and trying to decide which to get involved in. I’ve been surprised at the standard of provision at all of the projects. The Jesuits have done a great job of securing both international aid and local support – we had dinner on Friday with the Education Minister and the Water minister. They seem to know how to get everyone on side and it shows in the projects!
There are glaring differences between what I’ve seen here and the lack of support and development available for Tamils in Sri Lanka though. Tanzania is apparently one of the darlings of the aid donor community and while I’m sure its not the case all over, the places we’ve seen really are testament to how far that aid can go when combined with local vision and drive.
At the moment I know I’ll be teaching at St. Ignatius primary school for part of the week but I’m hoping to combine that with time in the local orphanage or youth centre. School only starts back tomorrow from the summer holidays but we had a tour yesterday which included visiting the cows which provide the milk for the children’s porridge breakfast, the chickens who provide meat & eggs for lunch and more disturbingly the desperately cute bunnies... I think I’m going to have to get over this squeamishness though – so far we’ve tucked into goat and were gleefully informed yesterday that we were eating ‘bush meat’ – no one could quite agree whether it was antelope or zebra, but it beat goat whatever!
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