Dar es Salaam

We finally made it to Dar es Salaam on Sunday.  We flew from Melbourne via Doha and highly recommend Qatar Airways.  We were met at the airport by VSO volunteer leaders (exactly as detailed in the instructions) and our education into Africa has begun!

The VSOTz office is in the Peninsula region of Dar.  It is in an old Colonial era two storey house with quaint rooms and various annexes.  I am in a group of 8 incoming vols - 2 Brits, 2 Canadians, a Filipina, a Belgian and 2 Aussies.  We are all women - quite unusual - and 4 of us are in education, 2 in secure livelihoods and 2 in health.

We have had talks on health, history and development.  We have been given more specific information about our placements.  We have talked and eaten together so we will become a network to help and support each other.  VSOs organisation continues to give us confidence that this placement will be worthwhile.

Tomorrow we have a free day - 7/7 is a public holiday in Tanzania to celebrate farmers (maybe!) and plan to go to the beach for a swim and picnic. 

Tanzania is a very poor country - that much is clear as we walk and drive around - but it feels friendly and safe.

I hope to post again before we head for language training at Morogoro.  I have a phone - you can get the number from my sister - so send me texts if you can.

Love from Jenny 

This will be the last post before we leave tomorrow at 11 pm. We're in Kinglake at Cafe M taking advantage of the free WiFi.  Next post from Dar es Salaam, finally with something to say!

6 days to go!

We started packing our storage unit today - three trips in the car have made little impression on the space in the shed.


The removals truck will do the big stuff on Tuesday.

It's just one week until we fly out to Dar es Salaam.  We have an empty shed and a house full of furniture and boxes - we just need to reverse that!
We are putting stuff in cases too - so far we are about 10kg over our limit.  We have until Thursday to remedy that.
We have our passports back with the Tanzania entry visas all present and correct.  My computer hard drive is chock full of (hopefully) useful resources.  I have bought a pocket size digital camera to record our adventure and display on this blog.
We are nearly ready to go I think - what have we forgotten?


7 days to go. 

Suddenly it is 'next month' that we are leaving and the farewell functions are starting.  It seems we have been 'going' for so long!  Yesterday a teacher at my school asked me, when I was collecting some packing boxes, was I back already!
It is time to get serious about what to take and what to store and what to put in the rubbish skip.  I have to cut down on the first two and increase the last.
I've been home now, getting organised, for 4 weeks and have piles of things in every room waiting to be sorted.  The lovely autumn sunshine keeps drawing me outside but luckily I have an enforcer, my friend Amelia, who comes around and keeps me on track.  Also it's winter now so maybe it will be too cold and wet to go outside!  Now I'll just go and see what is happening in the garden....


31 days to go.

The motorbike riding "thing" has been overshadowing all the other learning I should be doing before we leave for Bukoba. So last week, in addition to some more time confusing Mary & Phillip's dogs by riding pointessly around and around a paddock where there were no sheep, and arranging all the fiction books we own in piles alphabetically by author, I put some time into KiSwahali.

We have several different "teach yourself Swahili" resources and have covered Greetings and Being Polite. Steve has a phrase list that includes (under the general heading of "Flirting") such gems as "You are very beautiful", "I am a marine biologist" and "I am not a stalker". I think he needs to work on "That's too expensive" and "How do I cook that?"

I have been working on more prosaic vocabulary. I have learned how to count into the millions. What I need now is to know how language is used in mathematics. How do I translate two and one are three? I'll let you know what I can discover using the magic of the internet.

In the meantime if you'd like to learn some Swahili the picture below has the words of the Lord's Prayer = how many words can you translate?

ps. 7 weeks to go

Honda CB250 - today's vehicle of choice.

Back to Hopper’s Crossing today to do the motor bike Learner’s Permit practical test and after several hours intensive training, a PASS! Hooray!!

I still have the Road Craft course to do , hopefully in Ballarat in a fortnight or so.

Definitely a red letter day!