Winter Break: Winter School and Tanzania

This Peace Corps 24/7 commitment thing has really been true because my winter break did not feel like a break at all. It started with school and more school, and ended with an amazing trip to Tanzania with two of my oldest and dearest friends, Christine and La Tache. It was busy and exhausting and so much fun.

Right after my trip to Katse dam, I went to a PC meeting to take on more responsibilities to do during winter, then came home and went right back to school. The students that will be taking national exams in a few months attend winter classes so teachers can catch up on topics that the students didn’t understand or the teachers didn’t have time to teach. At this new site, I have been co-teaching, which means that I work with another teacher, and I only go to class with each teacher/class for an hour or two each week. So I really enjoyed winter classes with the same group of students and being able to teach on my own.  

During the last week of winter school, Christine, came to visit me. She was (and will be) the only person from home who got to see my second site so I am very grateful that this was able to happen. She saw where I live, what my school was like, and she even watched me teach my classes and met my students.

The one strange thing about me that I noticed while she was here is that I have gotten used to doing almost nothing. It was supposed to be rainy almost the entire time she was here and while it seems very normal to me to just sit at home and just read or draw or cook something, I think anyone (including most PCV’s in the beginning) could get bored and antsy, so I felt kind of bad. Luckily, we had a lot to catch up on and she got to rest and eat my home cooked meals (with lots of veggies) between her on-the-go stays in South Africa and Tanzania.

The last day we were in Lesotho together, little snow flurries started to drop. That means lots of snow in the mountains and fresh ice cold breezes. Our trip to Tanzania was best way to escape the cold!

Christine and I met LaTache at the airport in Dar Es Salaam. It was pretty late so we just went to our hotel and tried to get some rest for our fully packed trip.

The next morning, we were picked up by a tour guide to go to Mikumi National Park for a safari. The safaris that I have been on have both been in South Africa, which seems to have a lot more restrictions – in Tanzania there are no electrical fences keeping animals in and out, and it was actually nice to see that animals are able to freely roam. But to be honest, it was the least impressive of the safaris that I have been on (Kruger National Park and Pillanesburg National Park). It was a lot smaller and seemed to have a lot smaller variety of animals. Also, our guide spoke much less English than I expected. (Fun Fact: We were told later that all the tribes in Tanzania and extending to the surrounding countries speak kiSwahili, while in Southern Africa, all of the tribes have their own languages, so English became the unifying language, making English much more necessary to learn.) We spent the night nearby and did some more safari-ing in the morning before heading back to Dar Es Salaam. The most exciting moments were getting to see a lion up close, and many elephants, which are still my favorite!

The next morning, we took a ferry to Zanzibar. The ferry was 2 hours long and kind of bumpy. I got a little nervous when a guy came to force all passengers to have a barf bag. But we got to sit in the front of the boat outside and the fresh air and ocean view was refreshing.

I didn’t do a lot of research before going, but Zanzibar was full of sites and activities and history and culture. The afternoon we got there, we took a walking tour of Stone Town. Zanzibar was once ruled by Oman, and has significant influence from the Middle East and India, which reflects in its architecture, décor, and food. A couple of the buildings were the home of the Sultan of Oman and his family. It is also a UNESCO heritage site because it was once a large hub for the Arab slave trade. I guess I was kind of overwhelmed with information because I didn’t really catch it all but from the native tribes to the Sultans of Oman, the Portuguese, Chinese and British, they all have different but distinct marks are represented in Zanzibar’s rich beauty.

The next day, we went on a spice tour. This was definitely the highlight of the entire trip (besides getting to see Christine and La Tache!). We went to a spice farm where they plant all crops grown in Zanzibar for tourists to get a look of the entire range of spices and fruits produced there. Not everything was in season, but we got to walk around and guess what all the different plants were. Some, just by looking, others, we were given roots, seeds, leaves, bark, etc., to smell and feel and taste. The spices that are grown there include cloves (the largest export), cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, curry, and peppercorn. The fruits we saw were vanilla beans, chocolate, coffee, star fruit and a fruit that was like lychee. There was a fruit we opened and made some lipstick with, a leaf that we rubbed all over our bodies to repel mosquitoes (but it didn’t work on me!), and leaves that a guy made us jewelry with. And many more plants that I either forget or didn’t even know existed before. My favorite thing to see was cinnamon, which I never knew, is grown from the bark of a tree – they carve off pieces so the bark can regrow, which is also why the cinnamon sticks are long and curled. We finished the spice tour with a lunch made with fresh spices and a stop at one of the quiet secluded beaches on the island.

Our final day on Zanzibar, we took a small boat to one of the islands off of Zanzibar, called Prison Island. The island was originally slated to be a prison, but it became a quarantine site for sick people. Now it is a hotel, scuba diving location and preserve for giant turtles. The turtle sanctuary was so fun! They are extinct and under very tight protection, but once you are in the sanctuary, you can play with the turtles and feed them and touch them. We also got to explore the island a little bit and tell our boat driver to take us around to the scuba divers to see if we could see anything.  We didn’t want to get into the water because we had to take the ferry back to Dar Es Salaam in the afternoon, but the water was clear and it was just nice to enjoy the views above it.

Before I knew it, our vacation was almost over. We went back to Dar Es Salaam where we met with a friend of a family friend of La Tache’s who lives in Dar and had given us recommendations and advice on our travels. We had an amazing last dinner and I had to wake up at 4am the next morning to get to my flight. On the way to the airport, our driver, who was personally recommended by La Tache’s friend of a friend, was telling me that he knew about Peace Corps because he drives around one of the directors of Peace Corps Tanzania –  so just as I was headed to Lesotho, I was discussing Peace Corps and getting back into volunteer mode again.

I have been back for two weeks now. I started school again, right away.

My friend, La Tache, took the most (and probably best) pictures, here are the links to her blog posts about our trip:
LaTache’s blog post about our safari
LaTache’s blog post about Tanzania
LaTache’s blog post on Prison Island