Someone Tells Me It's All Happening at the Zoo

Hello everyone! Kyla, Jacob and I are alive and have not been kidnapped by the Chinese :) First, I am going to recap our last few days in Tanzania because I cannot contain myself and then I will provide a rebuttal of Jacob's last post.

We took a shuttle bus to Arusha, Tanzania early Tuesday and stopped in to see our classmate Bekka, who runs a non-profit that works with an orphanage outside the city. The Nkoaranga Orphanage is set in the foothills of Mt. Meru and cares for 23 children ages newborn to five years. First, in order to get up the hill to the orphanage, you have to take a piki-piki (motorcycle-taxi) or a strong-minded taxi cab because the roads are so steep normal cars barely make it. I kept wondering whose idea it was to keep going up the side of the mountain and make a hospital and orphanage in that spot. But I guess the location cannot really compete when it comes to natural beauty.

Jacob and Miriam

Second, the kids are wonderful and the facility is much better equipped than I was expecting. There is a separate school house for a pre-K program and the play-areas are large and have a lot of equipment. However, the supervision and safety precautions are less than ideal. I think my short stint working in childcare made me super-aware of health and safety regulations for children and it took a lot for me to take a step back and remember that the standards in Africa are not the same as standards in New York State. For two infants, nine toddlers under 2 years old and everyone else between two and five, there are two people on duty at a time. That means that if one person is cooking or washing clothing, it leaves one person to watch all the kids. Also, if a child gets sick and needs to be taken to the hospital, it leaves one “mama” at the orphanage to watch everyone. Generally not a perfect situation that makes the challenges of maintaining ratios in the developed world seem trivial. The non-profit is working on having three full-time staff because they recognize the lack of supervision, but as in everything, money is tight and training is even more scarce. Thankfully there are usually a few volunteers around to help, but again, that puts a lot of responsibility on teenagers that have little-to-no training and leaves room for neglect.

Despite my fears on the ratio-side, the kids are extremely well behaved, well-fed, and bundles of energy. I thought Kyla and I would be the two that Bekka would have to worry about in terms of stealing children away, but JACOB took the cake. He could not get enough of their smiles and laughter, and every time we had to leave, we had to pry children off of him.

Elephants taking a mud bath!

After visiting Bekka, we headed on a three-day safari through Tarangire National Park, Ngorogoro Crater National Conservation Area, and Lake Manyara National Park. Though I'd been on safari through Ngorogoro Crater before, getting in touching-distance of elephants, hyena, giraffes, monkeys, and lions never stops being amazing. Tarangire was filled with hundreds and hundreds of elephants. It was quite warm outside and we watched them take mud-baths and walk two feet beside the truck. It seemed a bit sad when the elephants lost their lustre and we began wishing for a giraffe sighting instead of more elephants, but there were hundreds of them! The park itself looked like a movie-set safari park with acacia trees, tall grasses, and perfect skies.

Cheetah. Look hard because it blends in!

Ngorogoro was as spectacular as I remembered, with the jungle filled hills giving way to a huge open pasture filled with animals. We saw everything from wildebeest and zebra to ostrich and giraffes. The most impressive sightings were the cheetah and a male lion in the bushes one foot from the road. And of course, Jacob's favorite: the dikdik, a small deer-like animal.

The last day we explored Lake Manyara National Park and saw fewer game animals but soooo many funky birds. I decided that birds are not particularly interesting to me, but it was fun to look at them through the binoculars and wonder how and why they evolved some of their features.

In the evenings we “camped” in tents outside the parks, but employed our own personal chef and our campsite included a bar and a swimming pool (set up by the safari company, not by our choice). So, we were camping lite! We returned to the orphanage for a few days and then took the shuttle back to Nairobi on Sunday morning. Last night we took a redeye flight to Mombasa and have been enjoying the heat and water on the coast!

Now that this post is super long, I'll hold off on my rebuttal to Jacob's post. But get excited for the next post :)

Random Fun Things:

--In Tanzania they sold Obama toothbrushes with the tagline “Healthy Living Obama Everyday” for less than 25-cents per toothbrush.

--There is a Huge advertisement on the side of the road for Abercrombie & Kent in the same font as Abercrombie & Fitch. Interesting.

--Being on safari is the opposite of going to the zoo. The people are in huge cages that move around the animals. It is an interesting role reversal :)

Maasai boys in circumcision garb 

--The Maasai people, who live the traditional life in Kenya and Tanzania (similar to the Amish in America), were observing the circumcision season. During this time, young boys in age sets around 13 years old go through initiation and get circumcised, symbolizing their transition to adulthood. Those going through the process wear all black, paint their faces white and black, and some wear huge feathered headdresses. It is super interesting.